Knowledge Management for Project Management: from unstructured to structured information

KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki session, pt. 2: This afternoon, we turned to the Logica use case, which is dedicated to the development and optimization of KiWi as a knowledge management tool specifically tailored to the needs of project management.

Regarding the use case requirements: As Daniel Grolin, a process expert and business architect at Logica (formerly WM Data), pointed out, what is most required at the moment is an application for designing processes, i.e. for designing the ways that people do things. This can be a painful process, in particular if one group of people (consisting of process designers) thinks about the ways that another group of people (e.g. the project managers) are going to do certain things – a collaborative approach should be able to

1) alleviate this challenge
2) generate commitment among the involved parties.

The primary users will be on the one hand the process engineers, and on the other hand the project managers who are the recipients and users of these processes.

In his presentation, Daniel Grolin chose one of four scenarios in which KiWi would ideally be employed: the risk analysis process – which is a vital process for Logica, as the outcomes of this analysis influence the decision whether or not a project will be accepted. From an architectural point of view, KiWi is going to mediate between the process guidance column – which consists of process and workflow features – and the final work product, i.e the result of a process, in this case the report of the risk analysis.

In practice this means that if, for instance, a user has selected the risk analysis process, the Kiwi core system and enabling technologies will provide concepts related to risk analysis, supporting the user in the tagging process. Wiki technology is already being used in the industry, said Daniel, but what is lacking at the moment is the integration of structure, and this is also where he sees the potential of KiWi as a knowledge management tool, and as a means to move easily from unstructured to structured information (by the way, if you are interested in using wikis in the enterprise, I also recommend this article: Wikis for Knowledge Engineering, and in Global Businesses).

Karsten Jahn (Aalborg University) then gave us a preview of a possible user interface (i.e. not of the screen design, but the functionalities) which seeks to address one particular problem: Many companies use many different, sophisticated tools which operate fine on their own, but are not integrated (i.e. there is no communication or exchange of data between them). With KiWi, the aim is to develop a tool that is going to be able to cover all features and processes currently being taken care of by individual tools, to allow for an optimum of data integration.

To conclude, Rolf Sint (Salzburg Research) showed us screens of the current configuration of KiWi for Logica’s needs – the example below is related to the risk analysis process outlined by Daniel Grolin above.