Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

Document Repositories
A technology for storing, tracking and managing formatted information objects.
Supports: expertise location, knowledge sharing
LEVEL OF EFFORT
SIZE OF UTILITY
SCOPE OF WORK
HIGH
SCALABLE
WIDE
The document repository of a Utility holds much of the support information needed by
decision-makers to make effective decisions. While the location of documents in an
organization used to be libraries and file rooms, today they are ubiquitous, accessible and
searchable from every computer hooked to a Utility Intranet. This is where employees will find
the policies, standards and standard operating procedures that drive everyday work. Thus the
focus of document management has moved away from stewardship to a greater concern with
the use of information itself, the processes that inform decision-makers across the Utility. The
flow of information throughout the Utility is the life blood of the organization!
From a technology viewpoint, there are many areas to consider when evaluating differences
among the large number of systems (both open source and proprietary) that are available for
use today. Those areas would include: community knowledge base (supports development of);
ease of deployment (packaging, installation, software and hardware requirements and ability to
support separate repositories if needed); ease of programming in needed changes (adding or
changing digital object types, consistency and style of code); interoperability (including the use
of standard meta-data); open source (future needs); scalablity (not only up, but can the
architecture be separated and used on different machines); security (data encryption, server
security, authentication, and access rights); system administration (customization and
publishing ease); and workflow tools (supports use of different tools and workflow software used
by the Utility). While some Electronic Document Management Systems may not successfully
satisfy all these areas, ensure that the one that is chosen meets the needs of the Utility and
allows the potential for upgrading as the Utility becomes more familiar with the system and
identifies additional requirements.
A key step to developing a document repository is the knowledge audit. Not only does a
knowledge audit help identify what knowledge an organization has, who has it and how it flows
throughout the organization, but it identifies the knowledge that should reside in the document
repository. See Knowledge Audit.
A taxonomy, an agreed-upon vocabulary of topics arranged around specific themes, is
developed to help organize the document repository and support search capabilities. See a
resource paper by TECHi2 on Organizing Knowledge with Ontologies and Taxonomies.
The KnowledgeBase Roadmap provides a framework for building the knowledge base in a
specific area of knowledge. This provides another step in the ability to effective access
information that is needed when it is needed.
In the results of the AwwaRF study on ―Strategies to Help Drinking Water Utilities Ensure
Effective Retention of Knowledge,‖ document repositories were described as representing the
best of the codified knowledge of the Utility (and therefore often the first place people look).
C-42
©2011 Water Research Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.