In today’s dynamic corporate environment and challenging economic climate, retaining corporate knowledge despite changes that take place in the organization is a key challenge. In a knowledge based economy, no company can afford to lose the knowledge acquired and retained by its employees, and an increasing number of organizations are taking steps to ensure that systems and procedures are in place to ensure this valuable resource is not lost or wasted for any reason.

It is to this end that i-Context has developed the iKnowledgeKMS™ and the associated knowledge portal, iBrainStorm, which enables companies to gather, store and retrieve corporate knowledge trapped in e-mails, documents, chat logs and even people’s heads. In addition, multimedia presentations, video clips and audio tracks are formats used to disseminate knowledge of a technical nature through video or podcasts. Such knowledge items are also easily published into the KMS with metadata to enable quick searching categorization and retrieval.

To ensure the relevance and correctness of submitted knowledge items, the portal incorporates workflows which require that all submissions go through a verification step before being accepted as a part of the corporate knowledge store. The security mechanisms in place ensure that confidentiality of privileged information is maintained with publishers being able to restrict access to certain sensitive items of knowledge to specific users or user groups.

While capturing all relevant and significant knowledge, ensuring that it is not lost to the organization, only an efficient and user friendly search and retrieval mechanism will ensure that this knowledge is accessible to be made use of by all. The categorization and search features provided will help an individual to find a knowledge item using text based searches, categorizations and taxonomies.

Finally, Web 2.0 features such as comments and rankings have been provided to capture user feedback on knowledge items, because it is finally the usefulness of a given knowledge item that determines its importance to the organization and the ultimate authority on this attribute is the actual user. These mechanisms allow knowledge items to be ranked and related based on perceived usefulness to the community, encouraging participation and increasing contributions and activity in the knowledge base.

Used effectively, the iKnowledgeKMS™ will ensure that your organizations most valuable asset is secured, protected and utilized effectively!