Best Practices: Technology and Systems - Functionality in Detail
Three of the key functional areas for CoP technology are document
management, expert directories, and
groupware tools. Other functional areas
include personalization, search capabilities, events/task management,
and technical integration. The following summaries describe
these three major areas and the major requirements that each
area provides. You can also Download the Full Requirements Matrix.
Document Management
Document management solutions can help government organization improve efficiency and accuracy by monitoring who accesses documents and what changes can be made. Automated modification security controls help avoid counterproductive changes and inadvertent deletions. As a result government organizations can more efficiently support their core business processes and better control associated expenses.
Document management is a critical role within the knowledge organization. Best practice KM organizations use document management systems to underpin the entire KM process: capture, discover, communicate, share, organize. Typical document management functional requirements include:
Storage facilities
Security and access control
Knowledge object types
Organization of objects according to a taxonomy of content areas
Within the overall knowledge for development process, communicating and sharing information is critical. And in communicating, community members want to know how to find experts and capture and harvest the experts' knowledge. This is where expert listing directories and tools come into play. In studying best practice organizations, we found that communities demand the following main functional requirements in their expert listings:
Question-asking facilities
Profiles of experts
Feedback mechanisms
Reputation builder
Automated ranking of experts
Automated ranking of responses
Automated access to databases of frequently asked questions
Groupware
Groupware refers to functions that help people work together collectively while
located remotely from each other. Groupware services can include
the sharing of calendars, collective writing, e-mail handling,
shared database access, electronic meetings with each person
able to see and display information to others, and other activities.
Functions include:
Asynchronous conversation spaces
Threaded and/or streaming discussion
Indication of "new" entries
Bookmark for messages
Subcommunities for subtopics
Public user profiles
User preferences for viewing and selecting postings
Navigation facilities among topics
File upload with postings
Search mechanisms for discussion postings, but not for uploaded files
