Case Studies in Knowledge Management

196 Bayer, Enparantza, Maier, Obermair, and Schmiedinger

The role of the cooperative shared server is twofold. On the one hand, the server
is used to provide publicly available industry-specific information, such as standard part
catalogs, cutting data, and so forth, as well as community home spaces for topic-related
knowledge exchange of the DMCs. On the other hand, the server should help to localize
other companies, find expertise, and bring them together for cooperation. The identifi-
cation of other companies is supported by company portraits stored on the cooperative
server and comprise information about the companies ́ areas of competency, machines,
capacities, number of employees, location, contact data, and so forth, whereas the
cooperation itself occurs in a peer-to-peer mode via protected knowledge spaces of
company servers. Concerning roll-out of the Know-CoM solution, this server supports
the creation of awareness (see section, “Rollout”).
Search inquiries collect relevant documents from the adequate private database of
the employee, accessible protected databases and public databases of the company
servers, as well as documents from the cooperative shared-knowledge server according
to user profiles and access rights. Figure 4 illustrates processing of search inquiries.
If an employee (here: user X) of a company (here: SME 1) formulates a search inquiry
concerning any topic, the company server of the SME the employee works for executes
the request and scans his/her private knowledge space and protected knowledge spaces,
for which the employee has permission to access. As depicted in Figure 4, the employee

Figure 3. Network of the company servers

Client

Private Lotus databases

Public Lotus databases Protected Lotus databases

company server SME 1

Public Lotus databases

co-operative shared knowledge server

Case Studies in Knowledge Management

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