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Technology Watch Knowledge Base |
ambiente s.c.r.l. Knowledge Management System Implementation |
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PROBLEM STATEMENT |
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The first and simplest assessment of the current (“AS-IS”) situation confirmed the general outlook of ambiente s.c.r.l. as a dynamic and lean organisation which was already performing some level of Knowledge Management activity, though not organized on a formal basis. By further inspecting the AS-IS case through more sophisticated techniques,the main areas of improvement were found to lie in the following: a) ensure better usability of the existing technology infrastructure (corporate intranet) as a repository of all relevant information, and possibly as a means for e-collaboration and distance learning; b) improve measurement, management and evaluation of the intangible assets lying behind the current work activities. Discussions performed with the top management of the company led to identify the first issue as the most interesting for its possible implications in terms of efficiency gains. The following efforts were thus devoted to the construction of a knowledge model for representing that scenario. |
The scenario description provided above implied that the technical solution to be chosen on the market or be (re)developed from scratch, would have to overcome some limitations of the existing ones (too process oriented, not intuitive, not enough supporting the individual worker needs), and be open to knowledge sharing between team members or inside communities of practice. Then an overview of existing alternatives was performed, and one solution was chosen which is briefly illustrated in the text. |
IMPROVEMENT APPROACH |
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The proposed solution was made up of two components: - a personal organiser similar to a Windows File Explorer and Outlook, but with a graphical interface based on ontologies mapping as described above; - a central server akin to a portal and with synchronisation functions to link the two. The support of the needs of the individual, as well as the dynamic networked organisation, was a fundamental objective of the proposed paradigm, allowing users: - to share information, and - to indicate relationships between documents and concepts in a semi-automated way, and - to share their interpretation and understanding with other team members thus speeding up a consensus building process. The proposed solution was integrated with a cost benefit analysis through which the customer company management could assess the improvement in their business practices after the introduction of the system. |
BENEFITS |
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The management of ambiente s.c.r.l. is aware that enabling a distributed access to the company’s knowledge base will free senior management personnel time, which will have a direct impact on their ability to challenge competitors. Also by implementing the system, those personnel whose work tasks is heavily composed by the editing and assembling of documents using MS Office tools can be more mobile, being able to work remotely. By organising collections of shared information and associated knowledge through conceptual principles a context sensitive browsing is enabled that significantly reduces complexity and helps users manage even large collections of information that would otherwise be overwhelming. The customers of ambiente scrl may benefit from this solution in terms of reduced time and better quality of the services provided to them. In fact, employees may use the tool to search, navigate and retrieve past knowledge from the “historic” server and check if a same or similar case has already been managed and solved in a previously accomplished job. |
It is likely that potential reuse of knowledge may be verified during the quotation phase as well, leading to lower prices per each consultancy report or laboratory certificate. Our expectation is that information and knowledge management capabilities of the customer will be increased, collaboration between internal and external team works improved and leveraged reuse of information and knowledge coming out of previous jobs. This will translate into a gain of overall productivity conservatively assessed in 1 person year (out of the current 70 employed people). |
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