Knowledge Manegment Systems Essays - , Term Papers

Knowledge Manegment Systems WEBSTER UNIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS? TIMOTHY W. HYDE COMP 5910 31 Mar 98 TABLE OF CONTENT TABLE OF CONTENT ii INTRODUCTION 1 WHAT IS A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 1 Technologies 2 WHY USE IT 2 Advantages 2 GOAL 3 SAMPLE PRODUCT 3 WINCITE 5.0 3 INTRASPECT 1.5 4 CHANNELMANAGER 2.0 4 Premise #1 4 Premise #2 4 BACKWEB 4.0 5 CONCLUSION 5 WORK CITED 6 INTRODUCTION In today's information based society, knowledge is power. By knowing their customers a business will have the ability to build products coveted by their customers. If a company is to get ahead in business today, they need to have a firm grasp on how to get the best production out of their employees. One way to help employees be all they can be is to provide them with the tools necessary to do their job. With the explosion of the service industry, today more than ever what employees need to do their job is information. Information about warehouse and store inventories, hot and cold selling merchandise and most importantly information about the customers they service. Software developers have heeded the call of the corporate leaders and are creating technology to help managers collect the data they need and put it in a useful form. This paper will discuss the emerging knowledge management systems being used today, in an attempt to take advantage of the enormous databases which have been created. WHAT IS A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM Knowledge management is at various stages of development in American businesses. Some companies are just taking their first steps toward identifying and organizing the components of their information systems. Others have already recruited knowledge managers and are looking to revamp and improve established system. The tools a majority of these companies are using in the renovation efforts are knowledge management systems. A knowledge management system is a software tool that is intended to assist, through knowledge processing functions, users who desire to retrieve and manipulate information for different applications. The various tools of such a framework should help users to originate and organize ideas or understand and communicate ideas more easily and accurately than can be done with most current tools. A knowledge management systems is an integrated multifunctional system that can support all main knowledge management and knowledge processing activities. Knowledge management systems are difficult to understand because the business processes it strives to computerize doesn't exist in the real world for most organizations. Unlike replacing a machine such as a typewriter or an office procedure such as document control, businesses have been trying unsuccessfully throughout the 20th century to make knowledge management a reality. Excluding those companies whose entire business is knowledge management, there's no obvious, proven model to follow. However, knowledge management can be described by stepping back from technologies and products and taking a high-level view of the business issues before jumping into technology-based solutions. A Knowledge management system is a program that provides companies the ability to gather its collective expertise. Valued at $1.5 billion in 1996 and slated to increase to $5 billion annually by 2000, the development of knowledge management systems is big business. The appeal of knowledge management reaches all types of firms, including automakers and consulting firms. With the decentralization of many businesses the focus on knowledge management has increased. Many of today's managers fear that corporate knowledge is being wasted because no one knows what vast knowledge exists. Technologies Involved Knowledge Management software helps support its users in their efforts to collect information, to organize it, to collaborate around it, thus allowing a means to search and discover knowledge contained in the group memory, so that it can be reapplied or extended, and reused. It does this by using a server to capture information from various electronic information sources This allows individuals and groups to capture information, together with its context, into the group memory from which it can be accessed from the user's desktop and across the enterprise. A knowledge management systems are composed of a variety of technologies including; intranets, data warehousing, decision-support tools, and groupware to name a few. About half of the companies recently surveyed by Delphi Consulting are creating systems which intranet technology to improve their knowledge management, while another 25 percent plan to do so in the near future. Similarly, one-third of developers surveyed by Delphi are creating data warehouses, while nearly 25 percent plan in progress to incorporate data warehouses. Also, one-third are implementing decision-support tools, while