Introduction
Managing knowledge isn't reserved for mega corporations anymore. All the employees in any company need to access information instantaneously in order to Enhance their functionality and efficacy. The sales department may require information that may have been the sole domain of the technical department so far. Is it easy to collaborate and gather the right information at the right time? Is all the knowledge within a company documented?Is it easily available to all employees? And what happens when an employee leaves the company?

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What is this knowledge that we are talking about? Intellectual capital resident in the brains of people, organizational processes, products, facilities, systems and documents is what is termed knowledge. In its most available form knowledge in any organization includes the ideas processed by entities and used to achieve the goals in the organization.

Any entity’s existing knowledge base is the only sustainable competitive advantage that a company has today and this unique resource must be protected, cultivated and shared within the company. This is where knowledge management comes in. It is a systematic process of capturing this knowledge, organizing it, filtering it and presenting it in a way that improves understanding among employees in a special interest area.

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Problem: Let's take a brief look at a knowledge management process that our company follows. Just as we talked about the need for knowledge management in any company, we identified the need for a knowledge management product – an intranet, a place where common information in the form of documents or files that needed to be shared across the company could be stored.

Until now, employees used off-line sources to track information within the company. Contacting a colleague in another department who had to search for the required information manually, was to say the least, extremely chaotic and time-consuming.

Also, project management although followed and executed by various individuals didn't afford the visibility that was so vital. Clearly, what the organization needed was to use a common platform to communicate, to Enhance project visibility, to make management and Human Resource strategies and policies transparent throughout the entire organization. In addition, if this platform also allowed individuals to create their schedules, track and monitor them and also access the detail description of the work that each one was doing, it would eliminate the need to use multiple applications.

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Solution: Categorization of information through an intranet – an internal web site was the answer. The Intranet portal that we built was the most suitable solution. Also, in terms of scalability it allowed us to add on more features as and when we felt the need. What did this portal do for us?

Before we explain what it did, it would be important to say that every employee begins their work day by accessing the portal to check on the latest happenings in the organization and then drills down to their individual task or project-view that this portal facilitates.

We are a process-centric organization and we are constantly measuring and challenging these processes. By using the Intranet to record this change it helped us track our growth as a process-centric organization. Work flows within the organization connected to form a seamless value chain. Personalized business processes could be accessed based on preferences and roles. Teams in different departments could collaborate easily by sharing common data and knowledge.

The Objective Management System - an in-house software created for project management when integrated with the intranet afforded even more easy accessibility. This also made sure that collaboration between teams improved as documents, knowledge and plans were shared.

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Knowledge management being the original purpose of thinking of such a system, we managed to link all important company documents, resource libraries and even our websites to the portal. Using content management features we also made sure that the content on the portal always stayed fresh at any point of time. Knowledge workers are thus empowered with the right information and access to multiple business applications.

Apart from allowing structured data management it incorporates a search engine that would help users query information thereby allowing greater control among departments and also provide access to data and applications from different departments.

Research conducted in the organization wasn't just documented here, but also discussed and debated about. Employees could create forums where they could discuss topics like improving the organization, the HR policies or even any zany idea that would interest the organization as a whole.

Being completely scalable and secure, we are in the process of integrating a client extranet with the existing intranet. This would afford clients a step-by-step view of their projects at any point of time during the execution of the project.

This user-centric work tool delivers a single point access through a common interface for all work and information needs within the company. It can upload and store HTML, XML and MS Word documents, maintain an index of search words, enable querying and categorization of documents. It aims to store, index and query more than one million documents and bring out search results within a span of 2 seconds.

Providing instant access to unstructured and structured data in this manner helps create an awareness of the company brand among the employees and they are able to align themselves with the objectives of the organization. Knowledge capture and management along with communication management brings people and knowledge together thereby creating a productive and satisfying work environment.

Technologies used in developing this product are .NET with C# and an XML backend. The intranet runs on Windows 2000 using IIS.

Expected benefits: Streamlining and integrating the supply chain

• A service that opened up a rapid channel of communication to a key customer group whereby purchasers could be alerted to special offers, short-line stock, product changes, etc
• A place to post company information such as legal documentation, background product information and technical specifications.
• Agreement tracking at different hierarchies – Customized access to users from different levels.
• Help users query about supply issues, clinical and medical issues.

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If what you've read matches with your requirements, please contact us and share your ideas. We can build a project management software application to suit your specific needs. Or if you'd like to read more about our services and see if what we offer interests you, check out our web and software development software services here.