[wdmmg-discuss] KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (or KM)

Mon Mar 15 19:55:12 UTC 2010

Good Morning,
I'll start with the suggestion that WDMMG needs a knowledge management plan
for discussion threads. Threads end up containing a great deal of project
development information and people end up searching them by keywords. Over
time, data mining becomes increasingly difficult.
Here's one way to resolve this issue from the beginning:

   1.

   Adopt a naming convention (STANDARDS) for email subject headers. It helps
   if the naming convention looks similar to the project management structure.
   (This implies the need for POLICIES and PROJECT MANGEMENT documents)
   2.

   The naming convention should be maintained in a relationships table, or
   at least designed to store in an RDB. Relationships allow for overlap of
   source information without reconciliation of the raw data. Relationships can
   often be taken directly from the top levels of the project task lists.
   3.

   While the emails (discussion threads) are still small in number, go back
   and edit the subject headers to conform with the new STANDARDS.

As an example, suppose WDMMG wants to organize their (sub) projects and task
lists in this fashion:
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
   PLANNING
   GOVERNANCE
   COMMUNICATION (with SCHEDULING, REPORTING)
   RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
      FINANCIAL
      VOLUNTEERS
      STAFF
KID (Knowledge, Information, Data) Management (a high level identifier for
an ontology)
   Knowledge Management (KM)
      Workarounds
      LIAISE WITH KF (for KM : GOVERNANCE)
   Information Management (IM)
      IM : MODEL
      IM : GOVERNANCE
      DEFINITIONS
      RELATIONSHIPS (DEFINITIONS, THESAURUS, ONTOLOGY)
   Data Management (DM)
      DATA : GOVERNANCE
      DATA : MODEL
      DATA : QUALITY ASSURANCE
      DATA : CLEANUP
      DATA : ENTRY
      DATA : DELIVERY
Using all capitals with a colon separator lets you put the identifier in one
cell and parse it out later in a more granular form, or transpose it to
different Standards with simple rules.

As with any ontology development you have the chicken or egg first sort of
questions when developing relationships. For this purpose, it doesn't matter
if PLANNING or PROJECT MANAGEMENT is higher on the relationships hierarchy
tree, I'd say just pick one (a structure) and go with it.
Cheers, Steve
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