atw: Re: Knowledge management

Christine
As others have alluded to, and you seem to already appreciate, SharePoint is
not much more than a document repository, with permissions, upload, book-out
functions, and because it's online, it allows people to share material by
sending a URL rather than having to attach documents. It's limited, and
would be useless for a whole of organization solution, due to rudimentary
functionality and significant structural limits.  Some people might like to
call SharePoint a collaboration tool, but that's a stretch.  At best it's a
good-enough dumping ground for small projects needing a not overly
cumbersome way to to share material for a period of time.

Remember TRIM?  Yes, the old, old, filing application, that used to be
confined to allocating a file number for hardcopy files with bright coloured
number tabs, and recording a file name and a brief description, file owner,
etc.

Well, Trim has morphed into an altogether more sophisticated knowledge
management solution.

Many government departments now use it to capture, track and store
ministerial or secretarial documents, for example.  However, it can do far
more.

One major gov't department has as policy that all shared and personal drives
will be phased out - within another couple of years, I believe - and
everything will be saved and managed in TRIM.  TRIM takes everything,
emails, ordinary documents, scanned documents, photo's, you name it.  It has
very rich functionality and provides an audit trail of every action, whether
an amendment or just a check out.  The search functions allow complex
searching using multiple parameters.  Highly scalable too, of course.
Access and permissions are fully managed, whether to block, allow read only,
or read / write.

The department in question already has it fully implemented, and everyone is
supposed to use it for everything, at least in theory, so the behavioral
change is well under way.  The final step will  be removing access to all
drives, thus making TRIM  unavoidable.

Having used it for a few months (I avoided it for a few months too), I'm
impressed, really impressed.  It's the only solution that I've ever seen
that makes sense for retention of corporate knowledge.  It's great stuff.  I
have only seen the full-blown implementation (call capability) in the one
department.  Have not seen it in use at all in the private sector (no
surprise there).

Hope of some interest to you.
CH.



On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Christine Kent <c.bkent@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Guys
>
> I have been out of corporate for a while and am beginning to fall behind in
> some areas.  For example, what does knowledge management mean now?  Are
> there any off-the-shelf systems that are particularly associated with
> knowledge management, as distinct from content management, records
> management or document management.
>
> Can something like SharePoint, at a stretch, be regarded as knowledge
> management system, or does it come under some other banner?  It contains
> 'enterprise content management' which seems to cover a lot of KM, but also
> includes collaboration etc.
>
> The reason I ask is that the TAFE division has a course " BSBINM302A
> Utilise
> a knowledge management system" and I keep telling my workmates that this
> course cannot be written as a generic course because every KM system will
> be
> different.
>
> However, I am wondering if there is starting to be something generic out
> there that we could teach about.  We are only talking certificate III
> level,
> which means average user level, not techo or high end user.
>
> Christine
>
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-- 
Carolyn Hart


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