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Interactive Knowledge Products: how to make knowledge more engaging (and stop creating more documents)

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Documents are an effective and lasting container to capture and share knowledge - but in this digital age are they always the best option? This article explores the growing area of interactive knowledge as an alternative to documents. Since the 1980’s, documents became electronic: we were able to share digital versions of our documents via floppy disk, email and the internet but they were still documents. In the last 15 years cloud and mobile computing, apps, social media and instant messaging reshaped the internet and enabled more people to share all kinds of content more widely than ever before. People expect to be informed and engaged by smaller, faster, responsive, usable and on-demand chunks underpinned by a data driven infrastructure - and we are not patient to search through screens of text to find the answer we need. Knowledge managers should consider new processes and outputs for this digital world and employ more non-documentary interactive knowledge formats. Let's see wh

Fast web content migration: what went right for a global oil company

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Your organization probably already changed your WCMS platform three times since the 1990's. What is the secret to a fast and effective web site migration?  This case study outlines how a global Oil Company migrated over 150 websites to a new WCMS platform in less than 6 months using a templated approach and repeatable methodology for simultaneous website migrations. OilCo.com This Global Oil Company successfully developed a diverse, often award-winning, estate of web properties, during the 1990’s. In 2001 the business was ready to “move up a gear” and create a single e-architecture to: Present a single, trusted face to the customer; Enable global sharing and re-use of content and applications; Enable personalization of content for site visitors; Become the easiest company to do business with on the web. The 2-phase project concept was: Design a set of re-usable “products” (guidelines, procedures, user guides and software tools) that could be deployed, on a site by

The CMG Knowledge Intranet (2020 Edition)

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CMG was one of the first companies in the world to use intranet technology for knowledge management. In this new edition of our 1998 paper, Corrine Sellens and I explain our process and the key principles of a knowledge management intranet.   Executive Summary CMG was a European IT Services company with a unique culture of sharing knowledge - they were 'Knowledge Makers'.  Rapid growth during the 1990s required CMG to find new ways to bring people, and what they know together. Intranet technology was used to empower individuals and to reinforce the corporate culture. A suite of intranet tools enabled consultants to collect, store, share, re-use and create knowledge in self-administered communities of interest.  Types of Knowledge Organization Based on our experience of clients at the time, we identified three types of knowledge organization: Knowledge Seekers  Knowledge Users  Knowledge Makers  'Knowledge Seekers'  are generally older and larger organizati