Organizational knowledge explorer: Architecture, designing and prototyping: IRANDOC case study

Knowledge management refers to identifying and leveraging the collective knowledge in an organization to help the organization compete more effectively in market. However, many managers do not have a comprehensive view of their organizational knowledge. It is also very rare that an organization utilizes an information system that prepares reports about its knowledge assets. In this research, we try to identify the knowledge assets focusing on research institutes. We define logical relationships between the main entities and discover organizational datasets that show the status of the knowledge assets. Then we design and build an organizational knowledge explorer prototype, named KnowEx, for our research institute, IRANDOC. We demonstrate that KnowEx software helps managers to gain an abstract overview of their organizations by exploring and observing IRANDOC organizational knowledge map. We also show that the designed software, KnowEx, works as a supportive tool to permit decision makers traveling around the organization knowledge space in order to decide about knowledge entities. This software provides a huge relational map of organizational knowledge assets that one can explore it locally.