Page 401 - Using MIS

Q7 What Is the Role of Knowledge Management Systems? 369

Figure 9-26
Microsoft.com Main Page Less
than 2 Hours after Surface
Announcement
Source: Microsoft Corporation

What Are Content Management Application Alternatives?

Three common alternatives for content management applications are:
• In-house custom
• Off-the-shelf
• Public search engine

In the past, organizations developed their own in-house content management applications.
A customer support department, for example, might develop in-house database applications to
track customer problems and their resolution. Operations might develop an in-house system to
track machine maintenance procedures. Like all custom applications, however, custom content
management applications are expensive to develop and maintain. Unless the domain of the
content management is crucial to the organization’s strategy and no off-the-shelf solution is
available, most organizations today choose not to support a custom CMS application.
Because of the expense of custom applications, many organizations today use off-the-shelf
software. Horizontal market products like Microsoft SharePoint provide generalized facilities to
manage documents and other content types. Some organizations choose vertical market off-the-
shelf applications. An accounting firm, for example, may license a vertical market application to
manage document flow for the processing of tax returns or the management of audit documents.
Such off-the-shelf products have considerably more functionality than most in-house sys-
tems, and they are far less expensive to maintain. Keep in mind, however, that organizations
need to develop data structures and procedures for managing their content; they also need to
train users.
Some organizations just rely on Internet search engines, such as Google or Bing, to manage
their content. Because these engines search through all public sites of all organizations, they are
usually the fastest and easiest way to find public documents, even within the organization. It
may be easier, for example, for a General Motors employee to find a General Motors document
using Google than using an in-house search engine.
This is content management on the cheap. Just put documents on a public server and let
Google or Bing do the rest! However, documents that reside behind a corporate firewall are not
publicly accessible and will not be reachable by Google or other search engines. Organizations
must index their own proprietary documents and provide their own search capability for them.
How Do Hyper-Social Organizations Manage Knowledge?

In recent years, social media has changed the orientation of knowledge management. In the past,
the focus was on structured systems such as expert systems and content management systems.
These KM techniques relied on planned and prestructured content management and delivery