Sharing knowledge and expertise across departments: Creating a database to address KM (knowledge management) issues and concerns.

Abstract

What do information professionals do when their clients cry, “We are wasting time and money tracking and re-tracking the same information!” At DePuy Orthopaedics we teamed up with colleagues from other departments to devise a knowledge-based solution to the problem. Over the years individual departments within the company attempted to manage their information needs by tracking the information themselves, many without the benefit of information technology or a standardized methodology. This created information isolation within each department. To remedy the situation the Clinical Research Department approached Technical & Business Information Services and asked if we would be willing to apply our expertise to help find a solution to this problem. This was an opportunity for the DePuy information professionals to contribute in the development of a key knowledge management project by collaborating with colleagues from other departments to devise a plan for locating the data and making it available to all employees on a web-based platform. Effective knowledge management builds not only on those with informational, behavioral, and technological expertise but also on people with valuable, often undocumented institutional knowledge. Because of this, interdepartmental teamwork is vital in developing and maintaining knowledge systems within an organization. This paper describes the Product Article Database Project to date and reviews aspects of what we learned of the information professional‟s role in the processing, preservation, and distillation of knowledge.