MediaWiki - Based Knowledge Management Solutions

Knowledge Management rises up to the height of corporate strategy level in large corporations especially hi-tech companies. Knowledge Management mainly comprises of Knowledge Capture, Knowledge Organization and Knowledge Reuse etc. Effective knowledge management helps corporations in various aspects e.g. reducing the cost of redundant construction, increasing the cross-teams collaboration effectiveness, resolving the problem of information silos caused by the complexity of the organizational structure and processes.This paper focuses on the analysis the core concept of knowledge management and the importance of applying knowledge management theory in modern corporations. The abstract model of knowledge management lifecycle is summed up as well. The author analyzes the key knowledge management problem in HP Enterprise Services Group, designs and implements the whole knowledge management solution based on MediaWiki according to local conditions. This paper describes the following main works and innovations:HP Enterprise Services Group did not address issues of lacking software products and related experience oriented knowledge base. This paper proposed the method of leveraging HP internal Wikipedia-HPedia as knowledge base, and creating Product Brief as container of product general information, relative project experience and feature comparison etc. By linking Project Profile Repository (PPR), Product Brief enables the association between "software products","users and delivery projects" and "strategic guideline and organizational capabilities". It makes us to be able to reach out the information of software product users, their project experience and associated capability status. Through the practical proven, the method itself achieved good results. The overall growth speed of Product Brief knowledge base is tremendous since it is deployed.As a deployment instance of MediaWiki, HPedia uses same wiki text for page editing. Due to the poor usability of such markup language, and for improving overall usage experience of the knowledge contributors, this paper proposed the solution integrate MediaWiki together with SharePoint. It leverages SharePoint as knowledge collection storefront and MediaWiki as knowledge presentation vehicle, which enables the knowledge contributors to contribute the knowledge to HPedia without learning complicated wiki text. After practice, this method achieved good results, and makes the overall experience of whole solutions more smoothly.There’s no cross-page content comparison feature due to wiki simple page structure. Base on the consideration of expanding Product Brief landscape relationships and increasing usability of knowledge itself, this paper proposed the development of MediaWiki extension:Data Aggregator for aggregating different Product Brief pages into Feature Comparison Matrix, which is not only expand the missing feature of MediaWiki, but also achieved real knowledge collaboration. By using this extension, knowledge contributors only need to focus on specific product knowledge, and their respective knowledge will be aggregated into feature comparison matrix automatically. It gives necessary support and help to solution architects, technology consultants and presales technology supports on software selection in IT system architecture.