Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

Walter Castelnovo
allow the information relative to risks and their management to be shared among them, which makes
inter-organizational management effective. All these fundamental aspects of the TRM model can
benefit from the use of social computing technologies and tools to support the risk management
processes.
Social computing services (SCSs) can be considered as a set of applications that enable people to
efficiently interact with other people, as well as sharing content and data, through the Web (Young
2007). Whereas publicly available SCSs are already widely diffused for private use (Pascu 2008),
their adoption and use by enterprises and Government is still quite limited, although it is widely
expected that the adoption of SCSs would have a high positive impact on both enterprises and
Government.
Figure 4 below gives a schematic overview of the more common SCSs, grouped with respect to the
four basic functionalities provided by social computing: messaging, collaboration, broadcasting and
knowledge building. Some of these services (the white area) are already widely used by
organizations, both for internal purposes and for customer related purposes. Others are being
increasingly adopted by organizations (the light gray area), others again (the dark gray area) are still
quite rarely used, although the greatest value is expected from their adoption. (Bughin, Chui and
Miller 2009)
In this section I will consider the opportunity of using some of the SCSs included in figure 4 to satisfy
the requirements listed in the figure 3 above in an efficient and effective way. In doing so, my aim is
not to discuss in any detail the properties of the different SCSs that I consider; rather, my aim is
simply to show where they could be beneficially used within the risk management processes provided
by the TRM model.
Figure 4: Social computing services (based on (Doculabs 2010))
The requirement A1 of figure 3 above concerns the identification of the people (domain experts) to
involve in the baseline risk assessment (and in the routine risk identification and analysis, as well),
that can be considered as a case of expertise management. A way to satisfy the requirement A1 is by
requiring all the organizations involved in the SUAP’s activity to associate an expertise profile to each
of their knowledge workers (or some of them), so that they can be available to public search (either
automatically or manually). This can be done by transforming the usual “directory of people” from the
“yellow pages” model to a social network model, analogous to the IBM’s “Blue Pages” described in
(Richter and Riemer 2009). Besides making the search of experts easier, representing expertise
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