activities that comprise the customized environment involve a tool-based interface with ... visualize the application through an Internet or Intranet network.
CORE-KM: A CUSTOMIZABLE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT Cátia Galotta, Ana Regina C. da Rocha Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (COPPE-UFRJ) Caixa Postal 68511 – CEP 21945-970 – Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
Káthia Marçal Oliveira Catholic University of Brasilia (UCB) SGAN 916, Módulo B, Asa Norte – CEP 70790-160 – Brasília – Brazil
ABSTRACT This paper presents CORE-KM, a customizable environment for knowledge management. Every customization constitutes a different environment that addresses the particular features of a specific organization. The knowledge activities that comprise the customized environment involve a tool-based interface with knowledge bases, creating a knowledge network based upon the organization’s Intranet to which the environment was customized. KEYWORDS
Knowledge Management Environment, Information Visualization, Knowledge Acquisition, Customization.
1. INTRODUCTION Traditionally, knowledge mangement has been seen as the effort to capture, store and disseminate knowledge by mixing information technology and business process. In a knowledge management environment the computer supports the development of the knowledge rich activities by manipulating information, while the repository stores the knowledge created and disseminate it throughout the organization. However, every organization has its specific business processes what makes unlikely the existence of a unique knowledge management environment that can serve different organizations. In this paper, we present a customizable knowledge management environment that supports the definition, customization and execution of specific management environments. Every customization constitutes a different environment that addresses the particular features of a specific organization.
2. THE CORE-KM ENVIRONMENT CORE-KM (Customizable Organizational Resources Environment with Knowledge Management) is a customizable environment for knowledge management in different organizations that can support their organizational processes. The motivation to the development of this environment came up after realizing that every organization has its own characteristics and different organizational processes and therefore has to be supported by a specific knowledge management system. The environments customized from CORE-KM are based upon an infrastructure that comprises a set of typical knowledge management activities (knowledge acquisition, creation, dissemination, utilization, valorization and maintenance) (O’Leary, 1999) that represent the customized environment functionalities and communicate to each other through a central organizational memory. The environment comprises activities that involve a tool-based interface with knowledge bases, creating a knowledge network based upon organization’s Intranet.
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In order to support the definition, customization and execution of specific knowledge management environments CORE-KM environment has the following functions: (i) helps the knowledge engineer in specifying the knowledge management environment that better suits the organization; (ii) helps the knowledge engineer in customizing the knowledge management environment; (iii) allows the software engineer to integrate tools developed to support specific organization processes into the customized environment; (iv) allows the organizations to execute the customized environment independently from the CORE-KM environment. The customization of a knowledge management environment from CORE-KM is performed in accordance with a customization process which purpose is to describe the procedures for customization. Its final product is a knowledge management environment that is made available to be deployed into the organization. The activities ahead comprise the defined Customized Process: (i) Identify knowledge need – comprises sub-activities to identify the problem and define the purpose of the knowledge management systems that will be customized for a specific organization; (ii) Establish priorities – depending on the environment complexity and extension and the organization resources, it can be necessary to establish priorities for the customized environment construction; (iii) Elaborate the supply proposal – consists in elaborating a Supply Proposal (ISO/IEC 12207, 1998) in order to formalize the environment customization contract; (iv) Perform initial creative project – defining the main environment interface characteristics and requirements; (v) Perform web interface project – defining the elements that will form the web pages; (vi) Build the customized environment initial version – choosing and customizing the generic tools that will be part of the customized environment; (vii) Test and evaluate initial version – evaluate the first customized environment version with the client organization; (viii) Develop tools to specific processes – develop tools according to a specific tool development process (Galotta et al., 2003); (ix) Test and evaluate the environment with the integrated tools – evaluate the customized environment final version with the client organization; (x) Deploy – consists in deploying the customized environment into the site where it will be used. The first seven Customization Process activities are carried out sequentially. The eighth activity (Develop Tools for Specific Processes) is performed according to a Tools Development Process to guarantee uniformization in developing tools and it can start right after the Test and Evaluate the Initial Version activity or at any moment after the conclusion of the Elaborate the Supply Proposal activity. It is up to the project manager to take this decision because at this moment the Knowledge Engineer has already identified the tools that will be constructed. With the infrastructure and the customization process defined, the representation technology for deployment was selected. We used a 4-layers architecture: (i) Client layer: comprises the program to visualize the application through an Internet or Intranet network. The visualization program used is the Microsoft Internet Explorer, (ii) Presentation layer: consists of the set of pages to generate content to the client layer. This layer was implemented with HTML and C# languages. The presentation layer server is the Microsoft Internet Information Server and the ASP.NET framework; (iii) Application logic layer: comprises business rules that define the way data will be used. This layer was implemented with the C# programming language using object oriented paradigm; (iv) Data layer: comprises the data storage base and the procedures to manipulate these data. The data layer server is the Microsoft SQL Server and the procedures to manipulate data are implemented by means of stored procedures.
3. CORE-KM CUSTOMIZER In order to help the knowledge engineer specify and customize the knowledge management system for specific organization it was built the CORE-KM Customizer tool. This tool supports the execution of the customization process. Figure 1 shows the CORE-KM environment-opening page. The “Environment Administration” link directs the environment administrator into a reserved area where it is possible to
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perform various operations like users and password registration, specific processes registration and lists maintenance. The “Customize the Knowledge Management Environment” directs the user to the CORE-KM Customizer tool providing support to the user during the whole environment customization process. The figure shows a tool page that supports the Identify the Knowledge Need activity. The tool allows the registration and recovery of general information about the organization (like address, market area, number of employees and geographical distribution), conducted interviews and applied questionnaires. With this information, the Knowledge Engineer identifies the organization existing problems that can be solved by means of deploying a knowledge management system. The Knowledge Engineer also identifies whether there is any information system or database in the organization to be integrated into the customized environment. Finally, the Knowledge Engineer establishes the purposes of the customized environment prioritizing the processes that will be supported by the customized environment, and suggests alternatives for the solution. The interface obliges the user to follow the customization process workflow that is represented by the buttons always on the screen left side. The tool also makes two buttons available at the screen right side, next to the title of the activity that is being executed. The button with a book sign makes the necessary knowledge to perform the task available and the button with a lamp sign provides the room for the user to make suggestions regarding the activities execution (for example, lessons learned, process improvement suggestions).
Knowledge Dissemination
Knowledge Acquisition
Specific Process Activities
Figure 1. CORE-KM pages.
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4. EXPERIENCES FROM ENVIRONMENTS CUSTOMIZATION Two experiences from environment customization from CORE-KM have been conducted. The first one originated the CardioKnowledge (Montoni, 2003) environment and was conducted to the Cardiology and Cardiovascular Unit of the Federal University of Bahia. The second customization experience was conducted to a software development company originating the TecKnowledge (Costa e Rocha, 2003). These two works were conducted as Master Degree thesis in our institution. For both organizations it was necessary to build new tools that were developed using and validating the tools development process. One of the tools is the CardioResearch that supports the processes related to the research on cardiology and is part of the CardioKnowledge environment. This tool makes it available the organizational knowledge about the conduction of researches on assistance clinics and on international multi-centered studies. The other tool is the Software Supply Manager that supports the software supply process in the environment. This tool makes it available to the project manager the organizational knowledge about proposals, contracts and projects and suggests knowledge acquired in similar projects to support new schedule, cost, resources, labor and project quality estimates.
5. CONCLUSION AND ONGOING WORK Keeping knowledge inside organizations is a recurring problem for many companies. We argue that a knowledge management environment on the Intranet of organizations can help in this task. Based on this idea we have proposed a model of a knowledge environment that can be customized in agreement with the specificity of each organization. At present there are two other customization experiences being conducted. The first experience is being conducted to the Budget and Contract Management area of a Brazilian company that operates on the petroleum extraction and refining sector. The management is responsible for estimating costs, elaborating budgets and controlling the execution of engineering processes in Brazilian oil refinery. In this context, the purpose of the customized knowledge management environment is to support cost management. In order to achieve this goal, besides the generic tools for knowledge acquisition, preservation and dissemination, the environment will also comprise specific tools to support the cost management process. These tools will support the process execution and the organizational learning on cost management. The estimate, budget, cost control and training processes have already been designed. At the moment, the specific tools are being implemented based upon these processes and in the near future they will be integrated into the customized knowledge management environment. The second ongoing experience is the customization of the knowledge management environment that supports the software development and research in the Sonar Group (GS) of the Brazilian Navy Research Institute (IPqM). The GS/IPqM develops software for ship sonar of the Brazilian naval fleet based upon researches on the submarine acoustics area. As military culture imposes a high personnel rotation, not only the creation of knew knowledge about the dominion (submarine acoustics) but also the acquisition of the necessary knowledge for software development, need to be supported by a knowledge management environment. This environment will make it possible to preserve the knowledge created by the researches and to quickly transform it into software products.
REFERENCES Costa, V., Rocha, A.R., 2003, TecProposal: A Knowledge Management Tool to Support Technical Proposals for Software Development, Proceedings of ICSEEA’2002, Paris, France. Galotta, C., Rocha A.R.C., Oliveira, K., at al, 2003, CORE-KM: Um Ambiente Customizável para Gerência de Conhecimento, Proceedings of I Knowledge Management Workshop, Fortaleza, Brazil. ISO 12207, 1998, Information technology - Software Life Cycle Processes, International Standard Organization. Montoni, M. A., 2003, CardioKnowledge: Ambiente de Gerência de Conhecimento para Cardiologia, Tese de M. Sc., COPPE/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil. O’Leary, D.E., 1999, Enterprise Knowledge Management, IEEE Computer, Mar, pp. 54-61.
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