Annotate! A Web-Based Knowledge Management Support System for Document Collections

Knowledge management is an increasingly important source of competitiveadvantage for organizations. Knowledge is often a renewable.re-usable and accumulating asset of value to firms that increases in valuewith employee experience and organizational life. Knowledge embeddedin the organization's business processes or the employee's skills areassets are generally hard to discern, accumulate and replicate by competitors.It provides the firm with unique capabilities or quot;resourcesquot; todeliver customers with a product or service. In contrast as we undertakeelectronic commerce, customer interfaces and business strategiesgenerally become more visible to competitors. Thus the organizationscapacity to effectively accumulate and leverage knowledge assets betterthan its competitors becomes a key source of competitive differentiation.As firms become more knowledge intensive, more effort is being expendedon knowledge management (KM). While much progress hasbeen made on designing IS to support decision making, the art anddesign of KM systems to preserve, index, formalize and leverage knowledgein organizations is still new (see Oacirc; Leary (Oacirc; Leary, 1998) for areview of best practices). Knowledge is fundamentally more complexthan information or data, and systems supporting knowledge managementhave a broader range of design issues. This paper reviews approaches to knowledge management supportsystems (KMSS) and proposes the need to design systems that carefullymap their features to target organizations and user groups. We illustrateAnnotate! as a specific KMSS designed to support the knowledgemanagement of document collections in federated organizations whichlack common vocabularies and central authority