Knowledge management has moved beyond using technology to manage documents, using online tools to facilitate employee collaboration and using business processes to archive project summaries.

Today, we must focus on something else: uncovering the knowledge that really affects performance, and deploying strategies to share that knowledge in an engaging job-relevant manner. Vangent can help you do this. We'll speed up the pace of your knowledge management programs to ensure that you keep pace with changing workforce demographics and dynamics. We do this through a variety of knowledge capture and dissemination strategies, and performance support offerings. These include:

• Discovery and documentation of key business processes, focusing on the tips and techniques of high performers, allowing others learn how to have similar high-impact on performance and productivity
• The capture and dissemination of critical knowledge in a variety of formats
• Knowledge Nuggets: series of short e-learning, skill-instruction modules
• Knowledge Banks: business process information expanded with supplementary case studies, project profiles, employee testimonials, and lessons learned to ensure job relevance and a richer learning experience
• Best Practice Libraries: video-vignettes in which key employees, industry leaders or respected thought leaders provide insight into key lessons learned, tips and techniques allowing new perspectives and context for daily work
• Virtual Subject Matter Experts (SME) - training SMEs to be content authors using templates and tools such as Macromedia Breeze to streamline and accelerate capture of critical knowledge
• Electronic performance support systems that deliver indexed repositories of the above knowledge in context-sensitive and/or just-in-time modes

Knowledge Management Solutions

Why do government agencies and organizations need unified business intelligence? A large portion of an organization's enterprise intelligence exists within documents, database forms, engineering and scientific notes, message traffic or other all-source analytical reports. These unstructured text documents may reside in legacy database systems, in storage area networks, or in knowledge management systems. With unified business intelligence, users can synthesize and evaluate large volumes of unstructured text simultaneously with their organizations structured data. Unified business intelligence means less time is spent on search and review, and more time can be spent focusing on making educated, strategic decisions that drive an organization's effectiveness.

Vangent has always provided technology, engineering, and professional services to government agencies and integrators worldwide. Our new Knowledge Management Framework will fulfill our customers' text analysis requirements. Our goal is to help our clients fully leverage and utilize the unstructured, textual (or other) content that resides within their multiple internal and or any external repositories, by refining, developing, and delivering cost-effective, timely intelligence support systems.

Vangent has developed a practice to provide knowledge management solutions to support the Federal, state, and local governments' unified business intelligence needs. Our knowledge management framework supports an efficient pathway for data to move upward into actionable information.

The Knowledge Management Framework

Vangent provides text-driven intelligence solutions to help organizations make more informed decisions by processing all forms of text to extract important information for use within analytic applications and business intelligence (BI) systems. We have developed a Knowledge Management Framework (KMF)of solutions that are integrated to support a variety of text analytic function. The KMF is shown and described below:

Operationally, the KMF solution is divided into three functional components or engines. Each plays a critical role in the information flow:

• The Acquisition Engine manages all aspects of data retrieval.
• The Distillation Engine identifies and extracts mission critical data.
• The Analytic Engine stores the information delivered by the distillation engine and enables interactive investigation of the information and reporting by the analyst, and/or feed of information to external systems/applications.

In addition to the KMF components, Vangent provides a comprehensive list of Professional Services and Support for the system.

Acquisition Engine

The acquisition engine is a critical first component of any text analytics solution, as it retrieves documents from the designated sources and converts them into a common format for use by the distillation engine. These documents may be sourced from numerous repositories. They may reside in a directory located on a server, be pulled from the Web, sourced from a cable feed or data feed, paper documents, or alternatively, be retrieved from a database, document/content management system or on a fileserver within the client organization.

Distillation Engine

The distillation engine performs the tasks traditionally associated with document categorization and normalization. The main function of this engine is to extract key information from the documents it receives from the acquisition engine and to assemble the extracted information into formats or repositories accessible by both third party products and various analytical engines.

Analytic Engine

The analytic engine is an advanced research application designed to help analysts gain insights into information contained in large collections of documents. The engine has been specifically designed for research tasks, and provides advanced visualization tools for rapid detection and understanding of complex interrelationships. This allows an analyst to pinpoint, unfold, and discover new information buried within the volumes of text. The engine's visual maps and tabular output provide a high-level view of the information contained within the document set, and allow the analyst to drill down on any piece of information to the single document level. The text of the original documents is preserved, allowing the analyst to recall and review the document as he/she finds topics of interest.

Our solutions help Federal organizations make better decisions more quickly by turning large volumes of contextually-based information into actionable intelligence. Adding this situational context to enterprise data systems empowers organizations to uncover hidden relationships, evaluate events, and discover unforeseen possibilities.

For more information on our services and capabilities, please send us an e-mail.