The SRA Symposium - College of Medicine

Thus the new program seeks out to answer the following questions:
• Do we have the right skill sets onboard?
• Are we providing the right amount of training to our employees?
• Do our employees understand the organization?
• Do our employees feel comfortable sharing what they know or who they know?
Papers
The first determination was to discover and locate a primary source of personnel peer-to-peer
information along with a location to store additional information such as demographics, and associations.
Using the backend of MS Outlook, MS Exchange, became the source along with adding
an additional data storage elements using an Oracle database. The Oracle database was already
being used by other applications; therefore, it made sense to repurpose the data for other uses. Instead
of asking users to go to both applications to update their information, the user interface was
morphed into one. It appeared as one application, but behind the scenes it was updating multiple
repositories of authoritative source data.
The second process was to develop a database that would automatically collect information relative
to a question and how it was answered. The process worked like this: A potential or current customer
would submit a question via the web browser to the organization. In stead of the web master
receiving the question to answer, the question would be routed to a business engine that would
parse the contents of the message and submit the data pieces to search an authoritative source of
data. The data searched would be people, who were able to answer the question before, personnel
demographic information, and answers from the previously submitted questions.
The next step, and probably the most challenging, was to inform the organization that the engagement
of a new program that automatically tracks requested questions from customers. It will be
critical that support from each member in the form of providing their primary and secondary
areas of responsibilities. Though this may seem to be an easy task to ask the element of human
interjection began to sink in. Since obviously military pretty much do what they are told, there
was no problem with them contributing to the bank of new knowledge. The government on the
other hand felt a level of insecurity as they did not see this new program as a state of knowledge
management, but a state of inquiring what exactly they do. Contractors did not add their personal
level of knowledge but only what they were hired to do based on the Statement of Work (SOW)
they were employed under. So from the start, the new knowledge base was partially validated as
the majority of the input was taken directly from employees’ personnel descriptions (PDs) which
often times did not adequately describe what that employee performs or really “knew” within the
organization.
With the new knowledge management repository in place, keeping in mind that this repository
will grow as new knowledge is added; the flow or decision path is needed to determine where the
question will get routed to based on the heaviest level of knowledge.
When the customer enters the question, as described above, the results are displayed via easy to
use tabs that would allow the customer to shift through various bits of information including
phone numbers or email addresses of knowledge workers within the organization who knew of or
maybe had an association of the requested information. If the customer decided that the information
provided was not enough, they were able to click on a button that would initiate an inquiry
and submit the question to the beginning of the decision path.
The business rules engine receives the question and determines the weight or emphasis of what is
being requested. Based on the findings with the assumption that “someone” is initially capable of
answering the question would be forwarded to that person based on their primary or secondary
2005 Symposium Proceedings Book 271