What is Knowledge Managment?

Knowledge Management is a series of processes that involve the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge. Knowledge management can encompass identifying and mapping intellectual assets within an organization, generating new knowledge for competitive advantage, making vast

amounts of corporate information accessible, sharing best practices and everything in between. Knowledge management tools facilitate these processes. Groupware and company intranets are two examples of knowledge management tools.

FDA Science FIRST

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is a large regulatory agency of seven centers and nearly 10,000 employees. Because each center operates independently, scientific knowledge gained in one center was often inaccessible to scientists from other centers. The FDA needed a way to consolidate scientific information from across the Agency to foster collaboration and communication and to increase awareness of FDA research accomplishments.

GNSI created Science FIRST, a virtual intranet science center composed of three main components:

• FDA Research Projects Database ­ provides access to research project summaries from all centers of the FDA with links to the FDA Skills Database for project primary investigators
• FDA Skills Database ­ provides quick identification of employees with specialized knowledge, experience, or technical skills for collaboration on issues affecting the Agency
• FDA Publications Database ­is a repository to house Agency publications and expertise, to promote awareness of the scientific activities in every center, and to ease the reporting burden

Developed using Adobe Cold Fusion, HTML, XML, and Javascript, Science FIRST yielded a number of advantages, including:

• Fostering collaboration and communication among Agency scientists by offering research, skill resource, and publication information, in addition to conferencing capabilities
• Increasing the expertise of Agency scientists by providing the most current technical information resources
• Reducing the time and costs associated with traditional means of information retrieval such as library visits, phone conversations, mailing of documents, etc.
• Facilitating the search and retrieval of scientific and technical information needed for daily work processes

Other Case Studies:

• Knowledge Management
• Workflow Management
• Data Mining

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