Knowledge Management at the Gordon– Staff Portal Project

Presented by Deirdre Carmichael

12 September 2008

Knowledge management vision

• KM is a means to create and support a culture of sharing that will build the Gordon Institute’s reputation of quality education and the employer of choice within the educational field.

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KM at the Gordon

• We have a Knowledge Management Committee that meet every month or so.

• The committee has initiated a project called The Staff Portal Project

• The aim of the project is research a new intranet to encourage collaboration and sharing of knowledge among our staff.

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The Staff Portal

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About the Staff Portal Project

• Project Manager was appointed

• 3 month project

• Key deliverables

– to identify the business requirements for a staff portal

– develop a demo

• Budget of $25,000

• A project to do a project!

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Issues with the current intranet

• Intranet is languishing due to lack of governance

• No clear vision or strategy

• Information is out of date

• Design is not user friendly

• No opportunities for collaboration

• Not seen as a trusted source of information

• Information Systems said ‘Content is not our problem”

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Identifying the business requirements

• Interviews

• Focus groups

• Full day workshop with consultants

• One question survey – What should the intranet enable you to do?

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What did staff need?

• Off-site access to work files, pay slips, QLS

• Opportunities to collaborate online

• Share learning resources

• Databases that can communicate with one another

• Electronic forms

• Institute calendar

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What else did staff need?

• Skills inventory

• FAQ pages

• Discussion areas, blogging facility, wikis

• Announcements in one central location

• Updated Staff Directory

• Room booking system

SharePoint

• Collaboration features like discussion areas, blogs, wikis, document libraries, surveys, task lists

• Communication features like announcements, news, FAQ pages.

• Support for image library but needs work for video and audio

• Integrated Search function

• Document management capabilities – versioning, check-in, check-out 10

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SharePoint

• Student Portal has been established in SharePoint

• Licensing agreement with Microsoft so maximise the return on our investment

• Integrates seamlessly with Office 2007

• Relatively inexpensive to implement

• Out-of-the-box technology so upgrades easy

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Jobs for the KM Centre

• Governance of the overall portal

• Information architecture and taxonomy of the portal

• Defining ‘content types’ in SharePoint

• Metadata policy

• Document management – archiving, document libraries – Records Manager

• Guidelines for a learning resources repository– copyright, intellectual property, metadata,

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Next steps

• Obtain funding for the design, build and deployment of the portal

• Knowledge Management Centre to be established and it should oversee the portal development

• Consultants to provide expertise on intranet roll out

• Workshops with the different Centres to help them organise their content

• Appointment of Staff Portal Administrator

• Content owners crucial to Staff Portal success

• Training across the Institute