KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Portals ………………………………………………………………………………………..3
2. Knowledge Portals and Technologies………………………………………………………...4
3. Collaboration………………………………………………………………………………....6
4. Content Management……………………………………………………………….………..8
5. Intelligent Agents…………………………………………………………………………...10
PORTALS
Information that is relevant is of value and importance. There is need to access this
information. This is not always the case but portals make this possible. They are
considered to be as virtual workplaces and also a “one-stop shop.”

A portal is a system that provides access to a repository of information. It is a gateway to

an organization's information, services and data. They are web based, single point of
access for stored structured data.

They:
 promote secure sharing
 Organize unstructured data
 Provide access to stored structured data.
 Simplify access
 Facilitate collaboration
 Assist companies in reaching out customers

Characteristics of portals
 Portals are customized according to their purpose.
 A portal system can have multiple portals with each portal having its unique
address.
 A portal can be an external network ( internet), an internal network (intranet) or
both, with each network having a unique address.

Portals solve/ address today’s business challenges such as:

 Shorter time to market
 Low staff turnover
 More demanding customers and investors
 Availability of information in electronic format.
KNOWLEDGE PORTALS
This is a type of portal that focuses on knowledge acquisition, production, transmission
or management.
Its focus is more on knowledge rather than information.

Knowledge Portal Technologies

These following technologies are integrated in knowledge portals:

1.Crawling:This is the process of extracting documents stored in multiple places to

make them accessible to a portal. It is automatically done by the system e.g. GCS
(Grand Central System).

2.Document analysis: Text analysis and feature extraction. Gathered documents must
be analyzed. Systems are designed to organize document content and store the result of
the analysis for effective and efficient use of the documents. Documents contain text.
The lowest level of textual features are words and characters. Textual features
characterize the document. To manage conceptual contents in a document, entities
referred to in the text that are specific to a given domain are considered. Meta-data
features are also gathered using crawling process and presented in an XML format.
Linguistic analysis techniques are used to search for entities and their relations in a
specified domain.

3.Document Organization:
In document organization, clustering and categorizing is implemented.
Clustering is gathering similar documents into a small group from a gathered and
undifferentiated documents. Clustering involves naming of the cluster. Clustering
methods use features that determine the degree of similarity of document so as to cluster
them into a group.
Cluster labeling inspects a final cluster and chooses the best feature to serve as a name.
Taxonomy is a set of clusters hierarchically organized and labeled. A node is a labeled
cluster in a taxonomy.

4. Find: Basic and advanced search

Users search for information to find what they need. This information is made available
once it’s gathered and categorized.

5. Find: Browsing and navigation

Some features for browsing and ease of moving around in the portal are incorporated for
this purposes. Such as links in the top and bottom of a page rather than only one link at
the top. This minimizes the need to scroll back up while at the bottom of the page.

Knowledge Portals are flexible easy to use and may provide any kind of content or
functionality.
The knowledge Portal architecture consists of:
 Knowledge base
 Function
 User Interface
 Navigation
Knowledge portals consist of several different types of content with examples:
 Projects – Project documents, lessons learned.
 Solutions – Methodologies, procedures, framework, FAQ, case studies
 Technology/ industries -
 Customers – Company information, projects, competitors
 Employee – Skills, contact information, education, experiences, know-how
 Competition – Services, Product, Company, Information, Best practices.
Benefits of Knowledge portals
 Increased productivity .
 Ease of locating documents.
 Collaboration.
 Better decisions based on useful information.
 Better quality of data can from improved searching features.
 Ease of sharing Knowledge.
 Ease of identifying experts in a given field.

Key infrastructure Component of Knowledge Portal

 Business Intelligence (Knowledge)
 Content Management (dynamic)
 Data Management (Structured)
 Data warehouse and data marts (analytic)

Knowledge portals provide two kinds of interfaces

 Knowledge producer Interface
 Knowledge customer interface
COLLABORATION
Collaboration involves a different approach to business – focused on managing business
relationships between people, within or without groups, and within and between
organizations. Collaborative enterprises differ from other business in a number of ways
and collaborative working needs to be simultaneously a business philosophy, strategy
and operational working. Effective collaboration unlocks the potential of the collective
knowledge and intellectual capital of the organization and its networks of business
partners, suppliers and customers. At the core of true collaboration is the ability to share
and catalogue knowledge, ideas, standards, best practices, and lessons learned and to be
able to retrieve that knowledge from anywhere at any time. Knowledge management is
not a goal by itself. Businesses don't exist with the purpose of spreading and advancing
knowledge, they exist for selling competitive products and services of high quality.
Based on these considerations, we propose some knowledge management approaches
for portal-based collaborative environments.
Keywords: Collaborative Environment, Knowledge Management, KM Lifecycle,
Enterprise
Knowledge Portal

Collaborative Enterprises
To collaborate effectively, people work in large virtual teams, created quickly, spread
around the world, and comprising colleagues, customers and partners. Working in these
global team-based environments, people establish relationships that may be short-term
project-focused or long-term and evolving over time. With each new relationship,
companies invest in selecting the right people, learning how to work together, and
determining how to extract the most value in terms of revenues and profits [20].
Integrating collaborative services with business functions allows companies to gain a
significant competitive advantage.
Information is shared more effectively, communication is more efficient, and companies
can make quicker, more informed decisions. More specifically, companies can shorten
sales cycles, accelerate product development, generate more transactions, increase
partner/customer retention, and expedite problem resolution. Effective collaboration
requires actions on multiple fronts: early involvement and the availability of resources to
effectively collaborate; a culture that encourages teamwork, cooperation and
collaboration; effective teamwork and team member cooperation; defined team member
responsibilities based on collaboration; a defined product development process based on
early sharing of information and knowledge; collocation or virtual collocation;
collaboration technology. Collaborative enterprises differ from other businesses in a
number of ways and collaborative working needs to be simultaneously a business
philosophy, strategy and operational working.

2 Portal-Based Environment
Technology plays a critical role in terms of how organizations collaborate today, being
an enabler of interpersonal interactions that comprise collaboration. The web can
support
the introduction of collaborative practices in all areas and the web-based enterprise
portal
is bidding to become the common information highway for the management of the
enterprise. A corporate portal can effectively create a shared community across the
enterprise (B2E portal)/extended enterprise (B2C or B2B portal) . Collaboration tools
such as e-mail, discussion forums, online meetings, video conferencing and chat are now
integral components of a corporate portal, all these collaborative capabilities are
included on a horizontal basis across the entire portal. A successfully enterprise portal
represents a single entry point for collaboration, information dissemination and
communication, application functionality and interactive capabilities within and without
the corporate entity – all provided in an efficient and centralized manner.

3 A Model for Knowledge Management Life-cycle

We present a possible maintenance based on a knowledge portal infrastructure. Creating
documents represents a significant percentage of the current activities, so the less time is
allocated to this activity, more time will remain for the members of the organization to
achieve the other tasks. Therefore, at the portal level, we will have to integrate some
instruments that facilitates creating knowledge of a document type, such as: text editors,
multimedia, Web pages, images, sounds, video editing systems, spreadsheet editors,
graphic programming’s.
At the portal level, in the central or distributed knowledge database (meta-base),
different kinds of knowledge are coded efficiently, assuring quality, accessibility, and
their representativeness with the help of some specific tools/technologies. Knowledge
can be stored in data warehouses, knowledge databases specific to artificial intelligence,
content specific structures or in a documents management system; all these will form the
portal knowledge meta-base. One of the forms in which knowledge can be stored is
knowledge repository, which stores knowledge that is often text-based and has very
different characteristics. It is also referred to as organizational knowledge base. A
knowledge repository is not a knowledge base of an expert system, the repository
containing all the organizational knowledge, not only the one needed in solving a
specific problem. Concordant with the different knowledge storing technologies, we will
use specific methods/ techniques to access/locate them. Knowledge sharing goes beyond
communication – it provides additional support by ensuring fast access to the latest
information, being able to assist users in finding the most up to date knowledge needed
for their task and the effective use of that knowledge. Collaborative tools sustain and
facilitate the transfer of knowledge. Some tools and technologies facilitates the use of
knowledge: Business Intelligence tools, expert systems

CONTENT MANAGEMENT
This the process of collection, delivery, retrieval and overall management of information
in any format. The content involved may be images, videos, audio and multimedia as
well as text. The stages in the content management life cycle are:
 Organization: This is the stage where categories are created, taxonomies
designed and classification schemes developed.
 Creation: Here content is classified into architectural categories.
 Storage: Content format j and storage devices are made based on ease of access,
delivery, security.
 Workflow: In order to maintain consistency with the organization policies, rules
are designed to keep content moving through a number of roles.
 Versioning: This step includes managing multiple content version and
presentation changes.
 Publishing: Here content is delivered to users, which can be termed as internal
publishing via the internet for employees.
 Archives: This stage involves where content is delivered and moved where it is
actually accessed.

However, content and knowledge are different things: Each of them needs different
processes and methods to manage them. Knowledge is the knowhow that is found within
everyone who belongs to a particular entity while content is the output which is
translated from knowledge.

Differences between content management and knowledge management

 In knowledge management, knowledge is dynamic and is obtained from
individuals, magazines, newspapers while content is created for the purpose of an
audience at a particular point of time.
 In knowledge management, the consumer is potentially or often an employee
while in content management the consumer is a customer.
 In knowledge management the purpose is to pass understanding while in content
management the purpose is to pass information.
  In knowledge management, it is all about accommodation between company and
customer while in content management it is all about collaboration between
employees.
 Content management enables information to be pushed while knowledge
management manages to exchange information.
 In content management, the creation is done by a small team of experts in content
creation while in knowledge management, each and every employee contributes
to capture the know-how.

Objectives of content management

Content management is highly dependable or reliant on meta-data and this makes it
accessible to right customers.

Types of content Management

Social media content management: It helps to create an organized social media
marketing strategy with defined objectives.
Web content management: It is used to create, manage and display web pages.
Mobile content management: It provides secure access to cooperate data on tablets and
other devices.
Enterprise content management: It is made up of content that helps in minimizing
overhead, eliminating bottlenecks, routing, security, archiving and content governance.

Content management system

This is basically a software package that provides some level of mechanization for the
tasks needed to effectively manage content. This system allows a user to create a unified
look and have version control. It includes features such as format management,
publishing and functionality to update content. It may support the following features:
 Import and creation of documents and multimedia material.
 Identification of various user and priority roles.
 The ability to manage many different versions of a particular content.
 The ability to assign roles and duties to different types of content.
 The ability to personalize content based on a number of protocols.
 The ability to publish content to a storehouse to support availability.

Content management governance

It provides content creators with structure and governance. There are three content
governance structure;
 Localized governance: It, models empower and unleash creativity by putting
control in the hands of those closest to the content. However, this costs partial-to-
total loss of managerial control and oversight.
 Centralized governance: It enables a large number of cost savings opportunities
in large enterprises to be realized by avoidance of duplicated efforts in creating,
editing, formatting and also through process management and streamlining for all
content related labor and also through an orderly updating of content management
system.
 Federated governance: They realize the benefits of both the localized and
centralized governance while at the same time avoiding the demerits of both.
However, this can be difficult because it needs negotiating boundaries of control
with local managers and content creators. This failure in realization especially in
larger enterprises is compared similarly to failure to realize the full return on cost
savings and investments that content management allows.
 Intelligent Agents
What is Intelligent Agents?
An intelligent agent is a software program that supports a user with the accomplishment
of some task by collecting information automatically over the internet and
communicating data with other agents depending on the algorithm of the program.

Both sellers and buyers require intelligent agents to carry out various operations
successfully example, an e-commerce website the business owner would want to
improve sales by interacting as many buyers to the website. Also, the buyer will want to
compare various products and their prices.

This has resulted to the need of creating intelligent agent to cater for the business need.

Importance of intelligent Agents

1)Do help buyers and sellers in carrying out online business transaction online
2)Efficient-Buyers can compare prices of products online at any given time they want to.
3)Comprehensive: They do provide complete and relevant search on the web engines
regarding a particular product or service

4)Interactive: Provide user experience to user, this attracts more user to use the
intelligent agent in their information gathering about a particular product.

5-Precise: The information provided by intelligent agent is clear and easier to

understand.
6-Powerful and versatile –When comparing it with other tradition engines, spiders and
web crawlers they are much better.

Features of intelligent Agent.

1-Mobility
Mobility in matters of devices and Operating system, since the intelligent agent moves
from one computer to another and gather various information until search parameters are
exhausted

2-Goal Oriented
Do perform task that have been dedicated to it as it does accept statement of goals,
It can move around from one machine to another and can act proactively in response to
their environment, and can exhibit goal-directed behavior by taking the initiative.

3-Intelligent
Have the ability to reason things out based on previous knowledge of the user, existing
environment and on past experience.

4-Independent
Carry out various task without human intervention, does make various decisions and
initiate action on its own

5-Reduction in net Traffic

Since the intelligent agent do communicate to each other, this reduces long waiting time
to search other place

6-Multiple task
They do perform multiple task which human cannot be able to carry out, at the same
time

Advantages of Intelligent agents to buyers

1-Transparency
Buyers can be able to compare various products on different ecommerce
website without going to physical point.
2-Can carry out shopping on behalf of the buyer and know various
requirements that’s meets his need.

Advantages of Intelligent agents to sellers

1-Know various market share changes – This helps to plan for future changes in
marketing strategy.
2-Knowledge mining- Involves extracting information of your buyers and business
environment this helps to well know them and plan on how your business will better
server them
3-Track demand for a product- Intelligent agent helps seller to know which product do
they want.

Disadvantages of Intelligent agents

1-It’s Difficult to capture various business knowledge

2-Takes long time to put information in a way which can be easily accessed and to be
shared with other intelligent agents

3-Intergrating the information into existing system it is not an easy task

4-Difficult to motivate people to share their information since they always feel there is
interference with privacy.

SOLUTIONS
1-One should be able to come up with different strategy to capture different data.
2-Consider the change which might take place on to the business and what impact will it
have.
 References
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 White, Blake (April 2004). "A New Era for Content: Protection, Potential, and
Profit in the Digital World". SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal. Society of Motion
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 Umeh, Jude (October 2007). The World Beyond Digital Rights Management.
British Computer Society. p. 320. ISBN 978-1902505879.
 What is content management (CM)? - Definition from WhatIs.com
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