ARCHIVED: About the hosted integrated knowledge environment project

The hosted integrated knowledge environment project is a community source next-generation knowledge management system (KMS) conceived to provide superior online self-service IT support via a collaborative effort among leading universities, colleges, and like-minded institutions. The project will provide an opportunity to build a knowledge management system that directly meets the varied needs of many institutions at a substantially lower cumulative cost than if each were to individually develop or purchase new knowledge management systems. The knowledge base (KB) of yesterday was about searching for and retrieving what experts had compiled. The knowledge management system of tomorrow is about two-way communication, collaboration, and shared content generation. Along with certifiable expert answers, there is enormous potential for communities to contribute support to each other. The objective is to meet the need for a software platform for relevant, collaborative knowledge sharing and just-in-time content delivery that supports the entire enterprise 24x7x365.

The system will be hosted within what may be the first community source cloud computing environment dedicated to higher education. The KMS will be the first higher education community source software project to share content as well as code, allowing participating universities to collaborate and leverage resources required to identify, collect, create, and maintain information in common (estimated at 40-60% of existing KB documents).

The project is a proposed Kuali Foundation project candidate, and could be perhaps the first product in a potentially larger Kuali Support initiative. The KMS is the foundation of modern support organizations and is the primary building block for a larger higher-ed specific set of community source support projects, potentially including ticketing systems, online software distribution systems, network configuration systems, system notification systems, and others.

The proposed community source KMS is dedicated to higher education requirements, unlike vended products. The KMS will house information that can be consumed by a search engine, utilized on other web sites, included in online help documentation systems, in communications, and through mechanisms such as RSS. The project will allow creation and maintenance of information in one place and reuse in many places. By hosting the knowledge management application within a cloud environment, other member institutions would not necessarily need to replicate or maintain the hardware and software infrastructure, and will be able to retain separate editing environments with content sharing as desired.

Participants will see their own institution's content, and knowledge managers at all participating institutions will gain access to and be able to draw upon each other's content and knowledge management solutions, dramatically lowering the effort required to author new content while leveraging the maintenance resources required to update existing content. In the current economy, systems that leverage code, content, and human resources will be in great demand.

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