Most private-sector KM adopters assign gatekeepers, who verify the technical accuracy of messages before they are posted, O'Dell says. A second option is to put quality control in the hands of users by letting them rate tips that are exchanged on the portal. Better placement goes to highly rated tips. Even without a weighting system, users ultimately create their own filter by discounting the opinions of users whose posts have been wrong before, Kantner says.
Not About Technology
In a way, NKO is a technology project that de-emphasizes technology. Sure, the NKO team must worry about making NKO easy to use and always available, or no one would rely on it. But those involved in the project describe NKO as 1 percent about technology and 99 percent about people.
And it's more than rhetoric. On a function-by-function basis, IBM would have beat Appian as the portal vendor hands down, Morris says. But feature richness wasn't the priority--speed of implementation was, because the NKO team had a point to make to those who might try to abort the portal's launch. The tight budget was also a factor--KM software from IBM's Lotus division would have been much more expensive, though Morris wouldn't specify the price difference.
The Navy also gets to influence future revisions of the Appian portal software. In addition to the teams of Appian staffers assigned to Navy bases, the Navy has access to developers at the vendor's Vienna, Va., headquarters. They respond to feedback and make changes on request, and they even recommend their own enhancements.
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