Knowledge Management @ Stylus

-- Anjana Srikanth

Managing knowledge isn't reserved for mega corporations anymore. All employees in any company need to access information instantaneously in order to enhance their functionality and efficacy. The sales department may require information that may have been the sole domain of the technical department so far.Is it easy to collaborate and gather the right information at the right time? Is all the knowledge within a company documented?Is it easily available to all employees? And what happens when an employee leaves the company?

What is this knowledge that we are talking about? Intellectual capital resident in the brains of people, organizational processes, products, facilities, systems and documents is what is termed knowledge. In its most available form knowledge in any organization includes the ideas processed by entities and used to achieve the goals in the organization.

Any entity’s existing knowledge base is the only sustainable competitive advantage that a company has today and this unique resource must be protected, cultivated and shared within the company. This is where knowledge management comes in. It is a systematic process of capturing this knowledge, organizing it, filtering it and presenting it in a way that improves understanding among employees in a special interest area.

Problem: Let's take a brief look at a knowledge management process that our company is working on. Just as we talked about the need for knowledge management in any company, we at Stylus, identified the need for a knowledge management product – an intranet, a place where common information in the form of documents or files that needed to be shared across the company could be stored.

Until now, employees used off-line sources to track information within the company. Contacting a colleague in another department who had to search for the required information manually, was to say the least, extremely chaotic and time-consuming.

Solution: Categorization of information through an intranet – an internal web site was the answer. Apart from allowing structured data management it incorporates a search engine that would help users query information thereby allowing greater control among departments and also provide access to data and applications from different departments.

Technologies used in developing this product are .NET with C# and an XML backend. The intranet runs on Windows 2000 using IIS.

This user-centric work tool delivers a single point access through a common interface for all work and information needs within the company. It can upload and store HTML, XML and MS Word documents, maintain an index of search words, enable querying and categorization of documents. It aims to store, index and query more than one million documents and bring out search results within a span of 2 seconds.

Providing instant access to unstructured and structured data in this manner helps create an awareness of the company brand among the employees and they are able to align themselves with the objectives of the organization. Knowledge management and capture along with communication management brings people and knowledge together thereby creating a productive and satisfying work environment.

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