You and I call it "knowledge management"
(KM). DuPont called it "convergence" when, in the early 1990's,
its legal department launched an initiative to reduce the number of external
law firms, streamline the management of more than 4,000 legal cases, and
meet the challenges of global competition. The formalization of the outcome,
called the DuPont Legal Model, has all the classic earmarks of KM —
electronic document retrieval, knowledge stewards, collaboration, culture
change, learning, and leveraging expert know-how. But it also has four
attributes we don't automatically associate with KM — significant
cost savings, selectivity, promotion, and revenue generation.
This month's entries include a discussion of three
new categories of user interfaces, highlights of a corporate ethnography
conference, and how to use "light-weight" protocols in digital
libraries.
A hands-on course that shows you how to develop, evaluate,
and use information models and metadata management tools. Models and tools
include ontologies, topic maps, thesauri, metadata repositories, crosswalks
and metadata maps, XML schema and style sheets, and application interfaces.
A hands-on course that covers the fundamentals of
business taxonomies: how to do a needs analysis, create a controlled vocabulary,
develop a thesaurus, and use taxonomy components in navigation. Includes
personalized assistance from our instructors and supervised work on a
real project in the Web-based Lab.
A hands-on course that covers the creation and use
of authorities as well as the development of two independent thesauri
that are linked through cross references. Includes personalized assistance
from our instructors and supervised work on a real project in the Web-based
Lab.
