Elements Of Secure Cloud Based Kms

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

An exploratory fields study utilizing an inductive methodology of case study was undertaken by interviewing 5 key knowledge workers from different industries. The 5 key workers are listed below.

China Light and Power (CLP)

Hong Kong Housing Authority (HA)

MTR Corporation Limited (MTRC)

Hong Kong CSL Limited (CSL)

VanceInfo Technologies (VIT)

CLP and MTRC are two famous public service providers in Hong Kong. HA is a government sector for implementing government housing services. CSL is one of the top telecom service provider in Hong Kong and VanceInfo is a large technology company which providing various types of consultation services and outsourcing services to different large corporation in Hong Kong and China. We’ll discuss more details on the companies’ background on later part.

In this research, we utilized content analysis skills to figure out the factors that influence KM and developed a research model. This study offers a model of KM adoption and utilization and provides managerial implications for organizations, particularly enterprises, to better understand the potential of KM and possible impediments in the process of adopting and implementing KM.

Introduction

The trend of globalization not only provides opportunities for firms to bring products and services to wider market, but also increase the intensity of competition. To survive in such an excessively competitive environment, companies should utilize their knowledge resources effectively in order to create competitive advantages and develop a greater ability to adapt and act. Treating knowledge as an essential organizational asset, studies in the area of KM have been grown dramatically over the last decade. Particularly, KM had become the focal point for debates on methodologies to facilitate firms from securing greater competitive edge in the global information economy. Thus, according to Carlsson (2001, p. 195), KM in this study is defined as ‘the process of identifying, managing and leveraging individual and collective knowledge to support the firm becoming more competitive’. The definition highlights the primary components of KM in the increasingly competitive world. First, both individual and collective knowledge should be identified. Second, KM involves the process of collecting and integrating the knowledge. Third, KM is primarily employed to increase competitiveness.

KM would be imperative for enterprises to enhance performance and gain a competitive edge. KM has been enriched with methods, ideas and technologies by contributions from diverse sources as management science, social science and information science areas. However, there is a dearth of empirical studies of KM adoption and practice conducted in different industries. Meanwhile, little research is available on people’s perceptions that may affect the practice of KM. Therefore, some questions emerge as: What must be done to adopt or initiate KM in business? What factors are important in KM adoption and applications in the enterprises? How to implement KM effectively? These are the main research questions in this study. This study addresses these research questions via undertaking a qualitative field study among the enterprises in Hong Kong. Applying the semi-structured interview approaches, 5 in-depth interviews will be conducted to collect data for developing a conceptual model. The chief objectives of this research are as follows:

To identify the factors for or against KM adoption and practice through the employees’ perceptions in the industries in Hong Kong; to further examine the factors influencing the adoption of KM on the cloud-based platform.

To investigate how KM investment affects the performance of an organization

Cloud-computing based KM is a major topic to be covered in this research study. As computers became more prevalent, people tried to explore the possibility on putting the application on the cloud-based platform. The powerful cloud based services enable companies to outsource their own IT services to the cloud service providers, including hardware infrastructure and software services. Nowadays, the email service is the most common service outsourced to some famous email service providers, such as Google, Microsoft Exchange Online etc. Apart from the core email service, they also provide add-on services for the companies and charged on monthly base. For Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft provides different packages which suit for different size of the companies in order to capture more market shares from Google, especially for the Web conferencing service which is proprietary on the Microsoft platform to integrate with the Lync Online services to enable end users from web conferencing without paying much on owning the hardware infrastructure.

Table 1 Example of cloud-based service

Description

Plan

 

Exchange Online Plan 1

Exchange Online Premium Plan

USD$4

USD$8

Inbox size

25 GB

25 GB

Custom email address

checkcheckcheck

check

Unlimited users

checkcheckcheck

check

Video chat, calendar, document editing and more

checkcheck

check

Spam and malware protection:

checkcheckcheck

check

Active Directory integration:

check

check

Simple file sharing:

checkcheckcheck

check

Web conferencing:

 

check

Site mailboxes:

 

check

eDiscovery Center:

 

 

Advanced voice:

 

 

Business controls

checkcheckcheckcheck

check

24/7 customer support

checkcheckcheck

check

99.9% uptime guarantee

checkcheckcheck

check

Business-critical data archiving

check

 

Data retrieval for investigation

check

 

Company-wide data discovery and export

check

 

As the lead of the software industry, Microsoft also provides the cloud-based KM service. SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that helps organizations share and collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers. With SharePoint Online, you can access internal sites, documents, and other information from anywhere – at the office, at home, or from a mobile device. The service also in cooperates with the Office 365 platform which enables companies to move their operations on the cloud base platform. In this research, we’ll study the trend of the cloud based KM in Hong Kong and also the barriers that companies resist to migrate their system to a cloud based platform.

Knowledge and KM

Concepts and practices developed through the 1990s conceived that knowledge was possibly the critical resource, compared to machines, capital or land (Drucker, 1993; Earl 2001). The nature of knowledge has been described as "justified true belief" (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Nonetheless, definitions of knowledge range from "complex, accumulated expertise that resides in individuals and is partly of largely inexpressible" to "much more structured and explicit content" (Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Becerra-Fernandez & Sabherwal, 2001). According to Davenport and Prusak (1998), knowledge is a fluid of framed experience, values, contextual information and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. Moreover, Bollinger and Smith (2001) describe knowledge as "the understanding, awareness, or familiarity acquired through study, investigation, observation, or experience over the course of time"; that is, knowledge is an individual’s interpretation of information based on personal experiences, skills and competencies. For example, in the case of CSL, "knowledge" comprises the customer services and professionalism on telecommunication area.

KM has also been defined in numerous ways depending on the purpose of research. Alavi and Leidner (199) defined KM as "a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge for employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive at work". Duffy (1999) mentions KM as "a process capitalizing on organizational intellect and experience to drive innovations". The American Productivity & Quality Center (2007) advocates that KM is the strategies and processes of identifying, capturing and leveraging knowledge to help the firm to compete.

Managing knowledge effectively can develop new opportunities, creating value for customers, obtaining competitive advantages or improving performance (Lloria, 2008). The activities of KM include knowledge capture, documentation, retrieval and reuse, creation, transfer and sharing of its knowledge assets integrated in its operational and business processes (Dayan & Evans, 2006). The processes of KM adoption and practice would involve the systematic organization, planning, scheduling, monitoring, and deployment of people, processes, technology and environment, with appropriate targets and feedback mechanisms, to facilitate the retention, sharing, identification, acquisition, utilization of knowledge and new ideas, in order to achieve strategic aims, for example, improved competitiveness or improved performance, subject to financial, legal, resource, political, technical, cultural and societal constrains (Lehaney et al., 2004).

Cloud Computing

Said by Keith Jeffery, Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz (2011), though the concept of "clouds" is not new, it is undisputable that they have proven a major commercial success over recent years and will play a large part in the ICT domain over the next 10 years or more, as future systems will exploit the capabilities of managed services and resource provisioning further. Clouds are of particular commercial interest not only with the growing tendency to outsource IT so as to reduce management overhead and to extend existing, limited IT infrastructures, but even more importantly, they reduce the entrance barrier for new service providers to offer their respective capabilities to a wide market with a minimum of entry costs and infrastructure requirements – in fact, the special capabilities of cloud infrastructures allow providers to experiment with novel service types whilst reducing the risk of wasting resources.

Cloud systems are not to be misunderstood as just another form of resource provisioning infrastructure and in fact, as this report shows, multiple opportunities arise from the principles for cloud infrastructures that will enable further types of applications, reduced development and provisioning time of different services. Cloud computing has particular characteristics that distinguish it from classical resource and service provisioning environments.

The concept of cloud computing is linked intimately with those of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service); PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service) and collectively *aaS (Everything as a Service) all of which imply a service-oriented architecture. And now, we’re exploring the opportunity of KaaS (Knowledge as a Service).

By exploring the on the KaaS model, we’d like to research on understanding the barriers that resisting companies from moving their knowledge on "Cloud".

Elements of Secure Cloud-Based KMS

Hierarchy: In many types of companies, there is good reason to arrange knowledge management systems in a hierarchical manner to ensure that information is available only to those members who have reason to be given access to it. For example, it’s often a good idea to keep most sensitive customer data hidden from lower-level employees who have no use for it. And for people who work higher up in the company, it’s sometimes safest to simply remove their access to unnecessary information to make data breaches that much harder.

Trust: As part of creating the hierarchy for the knowledge management system, the company needs to consider which employees should have access to the system and which should not. This can be a difficult choice, as it’s important not to alienate employees by restricting their access to information that might be useful. In any case, it’s a good idea to work with an outside consultant to determine who should have access to what. This way, there is no bias from within the company.

Monitoring: When a knowledge management system is not monitored, data breaches can happen in secret, and it may be months or years before the problem is discovered. That’s why there should be at least one staff member tasked with monitoring the system for signs of data breaches. Many companies assign this to the IT department, who monitor the security of the knowledge management system as part of their daily routine checks.

Continuous Change: Security systems that stay in place unchanged are at greater and greater risk of a data breach as time goes on. This is simply because anyone who wishes to break into the knowledge management system gets more time to figure out a way. That’s why it’s a good idea to have systems in place that continuously change credential information. Static passwords are convenient, but they can also be insecure.

Swift Response: It’s important to have plans in place so that everyone knows how to respond when there is a breach of the knowledge management system. When a breach occurs, the difference between a close call and disaster can be a matter of minutes. So everyone needs to know exactly what to do and how to do it if that moment should arise. Make all the plans in advance, run tests, and make sure every employee knows what to do in the event of a data breach. And when it does occur, get the word out right away so that everyone can take the appropriate action.

Conceptual Framework

The above diagram listed the dimensions of cloud based KM adoption and practice. We’ve categorized them into give categories.

Environments and industrial Factors

Individual Characteristics of Project Director / Owner

KM Promotion

I.T. Support

Organization Characteristics

When companies decide to implement cloud based KM, those are the major factors influencing the effectiveness to the implementation team. For environments and industrial factors, it concerns mainly on the common practice of using cloud based KM in their industrial area. If the industry normally access information in different geographic area, they’re more willing to implement a cloud based KM in order to centralized information needed. For individual characteristics of project director / owner, the stakeholders of the project are the major factor to adopt KM. Normally; traditional people are not willing to accept to new technologies. On working level, they worry that the new system will replace their role in the company and they’ll lose their job. On KM promotion, people are willing to adapt to new technologies unless the technologies have been utilized by some leader in the industry, like MTRC within the construction industry. I.T. support and organization characteristics are supplementary factors that influence the implementation stage of cloud based KM. We’ll further elaborate different dimensions influencing cloud based KM implementation by conducting in-depth interviews with five different industrial leaders on later sections.

Research Plan

We’ve chosen 5 different companies in Hong Kong in order to capture the factors for or against KM adoption and practice. Those industries have been facing the problems involved in dealing with more and more documents, customers’ demands for rapid and quality services, as well as selling various and complicated products. Therefore, this research attempts to fill this gap by examining the adoption and practice of KM among enterprises based on the literatures review and interviews.

Below are the representatives of different companies for conducting the interviews. We’ve chosen the companies from different industries in order to capture the common factors and variables on implementing KM as well as putting KM on cloud-based platform.

China Light and Power Company (CLP)

Interviewee: Rick Guo (System Analyst)

System: Smart Grid

Description:

The goal of the project is to provide a platform to support Smart Grid development in CLP. The platform will be in the form of a blog website, which allows CLP colleagues to learn and share information related to Smart Grid. The website will also allow public access to acquire general information of global Smart Grid development. In order to support B2B model, a selected group of companies can also contribute to the website.

Hong Kong Housing Authority (HA)

Interviewee: Tony Cheung (System Analyst)

Job description:

Tony is responsible for the system and function design in HA. Among those systems used in HA, some of them are related to knowledge sharing. I'll focus on capturing those information from Tony on his concern and barriers on KM and also cloud solution.

MTR Corporation Limited (MTRC)

Interviewee: Gary So (Project Manager)

System: ePMS / iShare

Description:

The merits of ePMS is to keep track status of user-definable workflow between different parties, to provide document management and to allow both MTRC and non-MTRC users to gain access in secure manner. This in turn provides the online information for every contract managed by ePMS system owners.

iShare is based on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 and is designed to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organisational goals and processes. It is the product of a year long collaborative effort between management and staff from across Projects Division to develop a knowledge toolkit that is practical and useable for all of our staff. iShare will continue to be developed and expanded as we hope to build upon your feedback as the tool becomes embedded in the work that we do. iShare should not be considered the final product, but instead the beginning of an exciting journey which will impact on the way that we communicate and share our knowledge and experience.

Hong Kong CSL Limited (CSL)

Interviewee: Sue Lee (Project Manager)

System: CRM

Description:

Currently, customer feedback of VAS and roaming are handled among departments through telephone and email. It is no ways for users to enquire the follow up status or to enquire full picture. To keep the customer feedback and have a quick way for process tracking, we need to enhance the end-to-end workflow function, front-end as well as the report system accordingly.

VanceInfo Technologies (VIT)

Interviewee: Kenny Mak (System Manager)

Job Description:

Kenny Mak is an expert on knowledge management area who acts as the technical team head on the solution team to provide KM solution in Asia Pacific. With his experience, I believe that I can capture valuable information on the concern on building KMS in Asia area as well as the limitation on moving KMS on cloud solution.

Table 2 Background information of the interviews

Enterprises

A

B

C

D

E

Name

China Light and Power Company (CLP)

Hong Kong Housing Authority (HA)

MTR Corporation Limited (MTRC)

Hong Kong CSL Limited (CSL)

VanceInfo Technologies (VIT)

Type of enterprise

Public Service

Government Service

Public Service

Telecommunication

Technology

Enterprise History

100 more years

Around 50 years

Around 50 years

Around 40 years

17 years

No. of employees

5000 more

3000 more

5000 more

1000 more

10000 more

Position of interviewee

Rick Guo (System Analyst)

Tong Cheung (System Analyst)

Gary So (Project Manager)

Sue Lee (Project Manager)

Kenny Mak (System Manager)

Tenure of interviewee in the enterprise

4 years

More than 10 years

4 years

6 years

6 years

Gener of interviewee

Male

Male

Male

Female

Male

KM adoption and applications

Applied KM implicitly ini the daily work

Initiated a few parts of KM

Promoted KM actively for years

Hand some parts of KM implicitly

Started the early stage of KM

Data collection

The data were collected by using the semi-structured interview approach. An interview protocol was designed based on the factors and variables discussed before. The semi-structured interview protocol (see Appendix A) aimed at elaborating on the factors and variables influencing the practice and adoption of KM in the corporations. We’ve developed the interview questions focused on the following areas of information which was required in this research:

General perception and understanding of KM

The processes of KM adoption and application

The motivations to apply and adopt KM

The factors influencing the commence of KM within the organization and the relationships between those factors

The barriers to implement KM in the organization

Incentives that encourage employees to adopt KM

Resources and facilitating factors of KM implementation

The benefits of KM for both employees and the organization

The perception of cloud-based system

The barriers on adapting of cloud-based infrasturcture

Factors and variables of cloud based KM adoption and practice

We targeted to analysis the five factors and break down each factors with relevant variables on conducting the interviews with the five target companies.

Environments and industrial factors: The factor related to the variables within the same business domain. How’s the other company within the same domain affecting your adoption to cloud based KM? In addition, the geographic location of the business will also be another concern as government may issue law / regulations to restrict / enlarge the growth of the adoption of new technology.

Industrial competition

Trend

Rules and regulations

Customer complaints and disputes

High development of IT

Use of a great amount of paper

Individual characteristics (Project Owner / Director): The factor related to the individual characters of the project owner / project stakeholder. In the case of MTRC, the new CTO encourage the team to implement new system for smoothen the company’s operation.

Educational background

Position

Work domain

Computer background and skill

Personality

Loyalty and belonging to the company

IT support: The factor is the base of successfully implementing new system. When deploying a new system to the company, IT support is a major factor for supporting the installation / execution on system rollout. With the strong support on hardware / software infrastructure, it creates a flexible platform for project implementation.

Hardware infrastructure

Software infrastructure

Compatibility

Security of data and system

Data updating and maintenance

KM promotion: Knowledge management normally is encouraged by the top management in order to manage the information in a centralized repository. The managed information can be reused in order to improve the efficiency of the employees. Managers can use the information for report generation or planning for the company strategy.

Top management support

Human and financial support

Time schedule and guideline

Participation of the department representatives

Knowledge transfer channel

Knowledge type

Reward for KM

Organizational characteristics: The factor related to the culture and structure of the organization. Normally, small / traditional firms are more resisted on changes. One / two experienced people in the firm know all the operations. They’ll not able to share their knowledge or spend extra money on building the KM. For large corporation, like MTRC, the turnover rate will be much higher than small firm. Therefore, it’s important for them to implement a centralize database for share among their knowledge in order to work effectively.

Size

Structure

History of organization

Variety of product / service

Interviews

VanceInfo – Kenny Mak

VanceInfo (officially VanceInfo Technologies Inc.) (NYSE: VIT) is an IT outsourcing company headquartered in Beijing, China. It ranks first among Chinese offshore software development service providers for the North American and European markets as measured by 2010 revenues. The service areas of the company are in tech, telecom, finance, travel, manufacturing, retail and logistics. There are more than 1000 employees in the company for providing various kinds of service to the client.

Kenny Mak, the system manager of VanceInfo who’s in charge of the Microsoft SharePoint solution team. He has been worked in the KM team for more than 6 years. "The society is changing; companies put more focus on managing their knowledge and try to create their own knowledge based system. SharePoint provides an enterprise platform for the companies to build their knowledge based system in a scalable way. It can be fully integrated with the Microsoft Office and Exchange in order to provide a total solution to the client." said by Kenny. Starting from year 2009, VanceInfo delegated a team which focused on implementing SharePoint solutions to the client. The major projects for the team implemented include The Hong Kong Jockey Club, Cathy Pacific Hong Kong and Prudential insurance.

As the system manager of the solution provider, Kenny thinks that knowledge is important and intangible asset to companies. How to manage the knowledge effectively is the major factor that the team should provide to the clients. In traditional society, employees normally work on their selves and they seldom shared their experience to others as they’ve to protect their position in the company. When employees left the company, people will find that it takes a long time in order to pick up the jobs left behind. Therefore, Kenny would emphasis the benefits on adopting KM on user perspective. The system not only shares your experiences to others, but also you can capture the knowledge from other employees. It helps to improve job performance and help you to understand the job natures of other positions. Users will benefit from shifting positions within the company.

In additions to the user perspective, management support is an important factor in order to rollout KM to the client. On the management perspective, the system helps on accumulating knowledge in a single platform and management can have an overview of the company activities by capturing information from the system. Apart from it, managing information effectively encourages the company become more competitive to the market. Kenny said "If you can response more quickly to the potential client, you’ve more chance to get the job." When convincing the potential clients to implement KM, Kenny always put the focus on several levels, management level, and end user perspective and finally goes into I.T. perspective. In order to rollout the project smoothly in the company, the cooperation of the I.T. team is a major factor. I.T. team will normally concern on the data security and the ease of maintenance to the system. When dealing with the I.T. team during implementing, try to convince them with the help of the Microsoft brand and minimize their workload on maintaining the system. VanceInfo benefits from the brand of Microsoft gold partner and awarded with Microsoft Best Solution Integrator, the clients believed that VanceInfo can provide the best Microsoft solution to them. With the help of the SharePoint platform, the platform is proven as a scalable, robust and stable which can serve any kind of customers. For handling some small sided companies, Kenny will suggest the client to join the SharePoint Online service in order to minimize the cost of maintaining the system. The companies may start from small with limited investment. If the utilization is satisfy and the size of the KM growth, the company can migrate the system back to on-premises based or upgrade the service plan.

With reference to Kenny’s experience, implementation of KM is a must to large enterprise in order to manage their information effectively. However, the experience staffs within the organization always resist to sharing their knowledge to the others. They’ve a mindset that if the job knowledge is owned by them, the company cannot replace their position easily. They can secure from their job. When dealing with such kind of users / project owners, the most effective way is to drive the management to impose force on them. When a project is imposed with a deadline, the users will try to cooperate with the vendor as they’re part of the project team members. If the project keep delaying, they’re also responsible on it.

MTRC – Gary So

MTR Corporation Limited (0066.HK) was established in 1975 as the Mass Transit Railway Corporation with a mission to construct and operate, under prudent commercial principles, an urban metro system to help meet Hong Kong’s public transport requirements. In October 2000, MTRC shares were listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. Today, MTRC is involved in a wide range of business activities in addition to its railway operations. These include the development of residential and commercial projects, property leasing and management, advertising, telecommunication services and international consultancy services.

With the various business operations carried by MTRC, the management starts the awareness of managing the projects information. Starting from year 2007, MTRC started the plan to implement KM in different area, Electronic Project Management System (ePMS) and Information Share System (iShare) are two of the projects to be implemented in the first phrase and successfully rollout to the whole corporation. We’ve invited the project manager, Gary So, who was in charge of the two mentioned projects as the interviewee to share his experience on implementing the KM projects.

Gary So worked as the lead consultant in Fusion System and contracted to MTRC as the project managers to handle the KM projects. Fusion System is the gold partner of Microsoft and awarded the Best Microsoft Solution Integrator in 2012. Gary So has been worked in Fusion System for 4 years and mainly responsible for implementing the SharePoint KM project to large cooperation, like MTRC, Swire Property and Census as well. We’ll put our focus on the MTRC in this interview.

As said by Gary So, "MTRC is a large corporation and it tries to expand its business globally. The management starts to aware the importance on information sharing. How to manage information effectively and how easy the information can be retrieved with proper privileges." Therefore, the company started the ePMS project as the pivot KM project to test the feedback from the staff. ePMS provide a platform for MTRC and non-MTRC users to access information in a secure manner. The system stores the contract information and allows user to define their workflow for circulating the documents to their vendors. Gary So mentioned that starting the first KM project was critical to the company and user. He targeted to have a good start in order to generate more business to his own company. In addition, MTRC is a famous company in Hong Kong and the success in the project will have a good reference to the company.

When started the ePMS project, the users did not have any concept on knowledge management. They were sharing files with the Windows Share Folder and contacts were sent out to the client through emails. In this case, the document circulation record could not be kept and the managers find it was difficult to figure out which is the latest contract version. In addition, there’s no versioning control on the contract document. When the employee want to revise the contract term with the sub-contractor, sometime they’ll make a mistake that using the old contract version for modification. That makes a bad reputation to the clients. Therefore, the management team invited Fusion System to implement the ePMS for managing the project documents, especially the contracts.

"The KM projects in MTRC are driven by the management in order to share information among different departments and business units.", mentioned by Gary So. He emphasized the project was driven by the management board to all the stakeholders in the project kick off meeting. With the influence from the management board, the stakeholders cooperated with the project team effectively and the project rolled out in a year. With the help of the new KM system, MTRC benefit resolved the problem on sharing project documents with the non-MTRC users. It increases the level of data security and integrity as all the documents are centralized in a single repository. In addition to version control, ePMS had been further developed to support on mobile devices on 2012. A new customized interface on iPhone and iPad had been developed for the management level staff in order to keep track on the circulation of the project documents anytime and everywhere.

With the success in ePMS, MTRC started 3 other projects in parallel on KM area. One of it was iShare and Fusion System was invited as the solution provider and Gary So was the responsible project manager as well. As mentioned in the previous section, iShare is designed to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supple access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes. It minimized the collaborative effort between management and staff from across Projects Division and to develop a knowledge toolkit that is practical and reusable for all the staff. "The resistance from users for implementing iShare was much less than ePMS, people has adopted to the KM concept and benefit from KM on ePMS.", said by Gary So. iShare can be defined as the next generation of ePMS for accumulating project information. In addition to the contracts sharing, the system enables user from creating their project site. The operation units of MTRC are widely distributed in different area, including Hong Kong MTR stations and ShenZhen Longhua Line, the information sharing among different sites becomes a barrier to the site managers and the management board. "How to reuse the information when construct a new station or a new route?" As the project information should be similar and can be reused from existing site, the management queried that why the new project cannot be created with a template? iShare provided a platform with the project template for the MTRC project managers to create their own information centers.

Figure 1 Sample screens from iShare

.

Referring to some of the screenshots from iShare, each project will have its own site for managing information within the project. When a new project is created, it’ll base on the module template to clone predefined information to a new project as guideline. Therefore, projects are not started from scratch. With the enhanced features, project administrator can enable the sharing of photo in the photo library. When the employee visited the site, he / she can be able to capture the real situation onsite and sharing in the photo library. In addition, the business process module allows the project administrator to create its own business process on document approval and circulation which increase the security and integrity of the project information. The system helps greatly on information sharing and business process control among different divisions of MTRC.

"As the projects sites are widely separated, the system can no longer sit in one of the sites for performance issues. The infrastructure and bandwidth support for the project is the critical factors leading to the project success." said by Gary So. Gary So convinced MTRC to host the system on a cloud-based platform to ensure the accessibility from different sites. Although it’s a private cloud which is only be accessed by the MTRC staff, it’s a good start to MTRC on adapting to the cloud-based platform. The infrastructure is no longer owned by MTRC but outsourced to a cloud service provider. MTRC is paying on monthly base in addition to storage usage which saved the maintenance cost from MTRC. Gary So said that, "The ePMS and iShare projects are two representative work in my career. The two systems encourage the usage of KM in MTRC and help to improve the efficiency on information sharing among the company and outside parties. I’ve made MTRC become the leader within the construction industry and the sub-contractors are now adapting the same strategy for project information sharing. I’m proud of being a member of the reformers."