Enabling Global Knowledge Management

In addition to enabling some of the traditional processes that IT is called upon to support, West IT has been given the opportunity to support West’s global knowledge management initiative. Our colleagues in Quality Assurance and Research and Development have enlisted IT to assist in the enablement of our Knowledge Management strategy.

We are currently in the discovery stage of the initiative: identifying all the source systems (both internal and external) and databases where information is stored across the enterprise, and determining who will need access to that information and in which languages.

One of the key technologies that West uses to share information and collaborate is Microsoft SharePoint®. SharePoint is one of our global systems to store unstructured data – that is, information that is not in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) or manufacturing execution system. We expect that SharePoint will be one of the technologies we use for Knowledge Management because it is commonly used by West, our customers and business partners.

Looking forward, we expect to provide more transparency to knowledge and expose that information differently to the enterprise. We also anticipate that this will generate the requirement to convert unstructured data to structured data and to store it in multiple languages. Last, we expect that we will need to ensure that the data is secure and reliable and that our colleagues are fully trained on the processes and tools to turn information into knowledge in order to provide the best service to our global customers.