Knowledge Management Tools

•Technology is used to facilitate primarily communication, collaboration, and content management for better knowledge capture, sharing, dissemination and application. 

•Many dimension are involved in describing knowledge management tools.

•Ruggles (1997) provides a classification of KM technologies as tools that:

1. Enhance and enable knowledge generation, codification and transfer.

2. Generate knowledge (e.g., data mining that discovers new patterns in data)

3. Code knowledge to make knowledge available for others.

4. Transfer knowledge to decrease problems with time and space when communicating in an organization.

Knowledge Capture and Creation Tools

Content Creation Tools

•Authoring tools, the most commonly used content creation tools, range from the general (e.g.,word processing) to the more specialized (e.g., web page design software).

•Annotation technologies enable short comments to be attached to specific section of a text document, often by number of different authors (e.g., by making used of the track changes feature in Word). 

•Data mining and knowledge discovery are processes that automatically extract predictive information from large database based on statistical analysis. 

•Blogs, is a term for a web log – a popular and fairly personal content form on the internet. A blog is almost like an open diary; it chronicles what a person wants to share with the world on an almost daily basis (Blood, 2000).

•Mashups is an innovative way of combining content (Merrill, 2006). Mashups are web applications that offer an easy and rapid way of combining two or more difference sources of content into a single seamlessly integrated application. 

Content Management Tools

Folksonomies and Social Tagging/Bookmarking

–Metadata is referred to as tags or keywords. Metadata is literally translated as data about data and refers to specific information about content contained in books, reports, articles, images and other containers so that they can be organized and retrieved in orderly fashion.

–Social bookmarking is a method whereby users participate directly in the storage, organization, searching and managing of web resources. 

Folksonomies and Social Tagging/Bookmarking

–Folksonomies differ from traditional taxonomies in that there is no hierarchy, no object-oriented style of inheritance from parent object to child object just clusters of tags that appear to be loosely related. 

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

–Tools for personal information management are impressive and, if you think about e-mail and portals are already widely used

–Newer tools such as blogs, news aggregators, instant messaging and wikis represent a new toolset for PKM.

–On an information-management level, PKM involves filtering and making sense of information, organizing paper and digital archives, e-mails and bookmark collection.

Knowledge Sharing and Dissemination Tools

Social Networking, Web 2.0 and KM 2.0 2.

•Social Networking are dynamic people-to-people networks that represent relationships between participants.

•Wladawasky-Berger (2005) notes that social networks are “knowledge management done right” as they address similar goals to solve problems, increase efficiency and better achieve goals. 

•The combination of social networking, blogging, wikis, and other related technologies together define Web 2.0 or the next generation of the web.

•KM 2.0 is analogous to Web 2.0 and refers to a more people-centric approach to knowledge management. 

•Traditional KM (KM 1.0) is based on knowledge repositories, the storing and preserving of knowledge but in a largely static fashion.

•KM 2.0 represents a new paradigm and much like the core attributes listed for Web 2.0.

Features of KM 2.0:

1.Contribution :

2.Sharing

3.Collaboration

4.Dynamic

5.Reliance

Networking Technologies

•Networking technologies consists of intranets (intra-organizational network), extranets (inter-organizational network), knowledge repositories, knowledge portals, and web-based shared workspaces.

•Three types of knowledge repositories:

1.External knowledge repositories (such as competitive intelligence)

2.Structured internal knowledge repositories (such as research reports, product-oriented market material)

3.Informal internal knowledge repositories (such as lessons learned)

•Portals are means of storing and disseminating organizational knowledge such as business processes, policies, procedures, documents and other codified knowledge.

•Portal serve to promote knowledge creation by providing a common virtual space where knowledge workers can contribute their knowledge to organizational memory.

Groupware and Collaboration Tools

•Groupware represents a class of software that helps groups of colleagues (workgroups) atached to a communication network (e.g., Local Area Networks [LANs]) to organize their activities.

•Typically, groupware supports the following operations:

1.Scheduling meetings and allocating resources,

2. E-mail,

3.Password protection for documents,

4.Telephone utilities,

5.Electronic newsletters,

6.File distribution.

Wikis are web-based software that supports concepts such as open editing, which allows multiple users to create and edit content on a website.

Today two types of wikis exist: Public wikis and corporate wikis. 

Knowledge Acquisition and Application Tools

•E-Learning systems provide support for learning, comprehension, and better understanding of the new knowledge to be acquired.

•Tools such as EPSS, expert systems, and decision support systems (DSS) help knowledge workers to better apply the knowledge on the job. 

Intelligent Filtering Tools

•Intelligent agents can generally be defined as software programs, which assist their user and act on his or her behalf, such as a computer program that helps you in newsgathering, acts autonomously and on its own initiative, has intelligence and can learn, and improve its performance in executing its tasks (Woolridge and Jennings, 1995).

•The following features are necessary to define a true intelligent agent :

1.Autonomy

2.Social ability

3.Responsiveness

4.Personalization

5.Initiative

6.Adaptivity

7.Cooperation