Essential Factors in Knowledge Management with COTS Products

Abstract

Knowledge management is concerned with the effective management of enterprise knowledge, the knowledge that an organization lives by and is built upon. Enterprise knowledge is often buried in different kinds of documents and media and is not easily captured and managed with conventional tools such as database and expert systems that are designed to work with structural information. As a result, document-centric knowledge management has become an important, or the most typical, kind of knowledge management approach recently. The objective of a document-centric knowledge management systems is to make the knowledge buried in these documents, and the relationship among these documents, explicit in such a way that they can be found, accessed, and reused in an efficient manner. There are many possible knowledge management strategies, some of which can be based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products.