Indiana University
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Project: Kuali Knowledge Management System (KMS)

Primary UITS contact: Chuck Aikman

Last update: January 24,2012

Motivation: Empowering People Action Item 27 states: "IU should continue to pioneer and provision effective means of user support through advanced tools for self-service and connection to IU experts to help faculty, staff, and students effectively use IT. IU should continue its work as a support infrastructure provider for national research projects and services."

Action Item 27 has four sub-items, one of which is to develop a Knowledge Management System (KMS) that uses IU's Knowledge Base as a foundation and adds collaboration features to enable other institutions of higher education to share code and content.

The Kuali Foundation open-source software model and educational community license was chosen.

Description: An integrated knowledge environment is a next-generation knowledge management system (KMS) conceived to provide superior online self-service IT support. IU and the University of Hawaii have an opportunity to jointly build a knowledge management system that directly meets the varied needs of all their constituents who use information technology. 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 and content, there is an enormous potential for university communities to contribute support to each other. IU and UH need a software platform for relevant, collaborative knowledge sharing and just-in-time content delivery that supports both enterprises 24/7/365.

Steps are already underway to create a new KMS that will be hosted on IU's Intelligent Infrastructure, and will modernize and extend IU's existing KB capabilities using new paradigms, such as wikis, crowdsourcing, community-source software, and service-oriented architecture. The KMS is the foundation of modern support organizations, and is the primary building block for a larger set of support projects (Kuali IT Support), potentially including ticketing systems, online software distribution systems, network configuration systems, system notification systems, and others.

The knowledge management system this project is creating will be 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 and in communications, and distributed through mechanisms such as RSS feeds. The project will allow creation and maintenance of information in one place and reuse in many places.

Outcome: This project replaces the IU Knowledge Base with an updated system that better meets the needs of IU students, faculty, and staff, as well as external partners.

Phase I milestones and status:

  • Initial analysis was done in October 2008, with a follow-up gap and needs analysis in December 2008.
  • Project specification began in January 2009 and is ongoing.
  • Exploratory research and initial development began September 15, 2009.
  • January-October 2011: Development of the baseline 1.0 editing environment, workflow, and author contribution system
    • Features completed as of October 2011:
      • Content elevator (interface with SVN repository)
      • Simple web based XML editor (CRUD - Create, Read, Update, Delete)
      • Metadata manager
      • Metadata mapper
      • Content validator
      • Hot item scanner
      • Desktop upload workflow (interface to desktop client - oXygen XML editor)
      • DITA renderer
      • Preview
      • Navigation filter
      • Publishing service
      • Delivery service
      • Search engine and indexing integration (Solr)
      • Worklist manager
  • October-December 2011: Testing, refinement, and UI/UX review
  • January-February 2012: Finalize code changes and documentation
  • March-April 2012: Data conversion and training plan
  • May 2012: Initiate pilot use
  • June 2012: Migrate from legacy KB system

Comment process: Direct comments to kb@iu.edu.

Benefits: The rewritten system will provide many advantages over the current system:

  • The new system will support multiple document markup languages, including the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an industry standard. Phase I
  • The new system will support many "Enterprise 2.0" features, such as a rating system for documents, threaded user comments, tagging, and expanded content delivery abilities. Phase II or later
  • Users will have the option of logging in for enhanced features, such as a "favorite documents" list and saved searches. Phase II or later
  • The new system will support an API for integration into other support tools used for walk-in, telephone, chat, email, and on-site support. Phase II
  • Based on Kuali Rice, the system will expose a rich web services interface, allowing other enterprise systems to use the KB as a repository for context-sensitive help to users of that application. Phase I
  • It will be able to host KB systems at other institutions, while using the same backend as IU. Phase II
  • Expanded reporting metrics will be loaded into the institution's data warehouse for analysis. Phase II

Project team: This project is a collaboration between Indiana University and the University of Hawaii. At IU, the Support and Enterprise Software divisions of UITS are both involved in the project. Furthermore, the project consists of a Functional Team responsible for functional analysis, and a Technical Team responsible for implementation.

Functional Team members:

  • Jonathan Bolte, functional council chair
  • Andy Orahood, business analyst and product manager
  • Julie Thatcher, lead subject matter expert (SME)
  • Paul Brown, SME
  • Michael Dalton, SME
  • Stephanie Louraine, SME
  • Elizabeth Venstra, SME
  • Sheryl Swinson, SME
  • Greg Hanek, SME
  • Ryan McCalla (University of Hawaii), SME
  • Mitch Ochi (University of Hawaii), SME

Technical Team members:

  • Chuck Aikman, project manager
  • Mike Riley, lead technical architect
  • Steven Black, configuration manager and developer
  • Weldon Sams, developer
  • Brent Moberly, developer
  • Asik Pradhan Gongaju, developer
  • Alan Tsang (University of Hawaii), developer
  • Ray Foster, UI designer

Executive sponsors:

  • Sue Workman (Associate Vice President for Communication & Support)
  • Brian McGough (Director, Enterprise Services Integration and Delivery)
  • David Lassner (Vice President for IT and CIO, University of Hawaii)