A Web-Based Knowledge Management Environment for Consulting and Research Organizations
Consulting and research organizations are characterized by a project orientation, teamwork, a flat organizational structure, and a dynamically changing set of personnel roles and objectives. These organizations develop information content in the form of reports, various graphics, presentations, documents, and sometimes video and audio files that can be broadly defined as project artifacts. Knowledge is often defined by “best practices,” formalized procedures, and external connections. Although many organizations possess characteristics common to those of consulting and research organizations, the unique focus of consulting and research firms on knowledge, as one of the primary products offered to clients requires a knowledge management effort and technological infrastructure that support this unique focus. In this paper we present a Web portal-based knowledge management architecture designed to support the specific knowledge management activities prevalent in consulting and research firms. The architecture is composed of advanced computational techniques consisting of an XML-based repository of organizational artifacts, a software bus, groupware, a multimedia repository, and ontological reasoning. The Web portal is a view into groupware, search, and multimedia applications as well as normal Web functionality. The architecture is three tiered with the client tier consisting of a Web browser, a middle tier consisting of the support applications encapsulated in a portal, and a back tier containing the repositories and databases. An index/repository engine is used in the back tier to manage the contents of a separate index repository and an ontology repository. An ontology repository is used to store expressions that are a form of knowledge representation that can be queried. An index repository contains indexes to HTML and XML based Web pages containing organizational artifacts. The architecture represents a unified use of various technology components that, in concert, provide the functionality and integration of technology required by consulting and research firms to harvest and leverage the combined knowledge of their knowledge workers to provide better service to their clients.