Question

Why do all the business units in an organization that use technology need to be involved in developing management information systems? How does that relate to the goal that a “knowledge-management repository” can be used throughout the organization?

“Think out of the box”: Be sure to discuss how you have been participated in, or would like to participate in a project that would develop a knowledge management system for an organization. Specifically, what role would you want to take, and how would you go about providing a meaningful contribution to such a project?

Answer 1

When using technology for business, the way we handle data and information changes. We as employees and organization are comfortable in holding information with us. However, in an organization, information needs to be exchanged, transformed, and analyzed on a regular basis in order to remain competitive and efficient. This is where management information system comes in.

Management information system categorizes and holds information for operation, business, and activities in an organized and structured manner. Other than holding data, it also processes information and delivers these information when requested. For an organization to operate efficiently, different units within the organization may require to access same data but extract different insights – often at the same time. Management information system makes such capabilities available to the entire organization.

Knowledge management repository is a way to categorize and store business knowledge within the management information system. Consider patient records in a hospital. The doctors often needs to refer a patient to one another and in such case, if the patient record is held in a database then the process becomes easier. The next doctor can pull up the patient health history and begin treatment. Knowledge management repository also serves as storage for various knowledge that is obtained during the course of business. Consider a technical support business. Various support questions and their answers are usually stored as documents in the knowledge repository.

I have participated in development of knowledge management system for one of my past organization. I used to work as a software developer and we often had to deal with new tools/applications in order build solutions. However, whenever a new tools or application was assigned, it had significant learning curve. Due to this, we would often lose time in the project. In order to smoothen the process of onboarding people on new tools our team began working on building a knowledge management system. The knowledge management repository consisted of documents, how-to guides, manuals and quirks of most of the common tools used across the organization. I participated in creating three documents that included Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Volume Licensing tool and Leave allocation system. As a creator of the document, I also had complete ownership and needed to update these document whenever there was any update within the organization.