The Knowledge Depot: Building and Evaluating a Knowledge Management System

Organizations have long had the need to record and protect the knowledge that is their intellectual capital. However, the primary burden for knowledge management has been borne by individuals. Technological changes make such informal methods inadequate and necessitate the development of knowledge management systems that alleviate the reliance on individuals. In this paper, we describe the Knowledge Depot knowledge management system. The main technical challenges were to support the entire organization as well as individual work groups, to automate as much information capturing and organizing as possible, to ensure that organization members are aware of the information resources available to them, and to customize the system to fit the unique needs of the sponsoring organization. To address these challenges, the Knowledge Depot system was designed with four main components. The first, Electronic Publication allows selected members of the Next Step Organization to publish content electronically to its members. The second, Communication Networks, provides a way for the users to communicate with relevant groups in the organization and defines the communities of practice for the organization. The third, Group Depots, captures and organizes group communication and other group artifacts. The last, Sharing Mechanisms, allow users to share group repositories and other online content across the organization. We focus primarily on the components of the system and the criteria by which success must be measured.