Abstract:

This article (1) outlines the architectural foundations of enterprise KMS, describing the underlying technological fabrics and then pointing at the key capabilities of the intelligent enterprise operating in constantly evolving, dynamic market condition, (2) analyses cloud architectural and practical insights within Enterprise 2.0, and (3) presents our scientific research within the framework of the currently running projects of the R&D Laboratory on eLearning Technologies and Standards at the Technical University – Sofia (TU-Sofia), Bulgaria, namely: METASPEED Project funded by the Bulgarian NSF, 2009-2012, and the research project “Learning and Knowledge Management Fostered by ILIAS”, 2011-2012, funded by the TU-Sofia R&D Sector. The purpose of our study is to discuss the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 as a must for knowledge-based organizations within the changing social paradigms. Thus we need to improve understanding of the difference which makes ‘enterprise knowledge’ in operational tasks (automation) and strategic situations (decision making). This study also gives examples for state-of-the-art models of cloud infrastructures for enterprise organizations, the benefits they provide and implementation of Platform-as-a-Service model of virtualization and distributed collaboration system (Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and ILIAS implementation for professional learning and competence development conducted by the TU-Sofia team).
Cloud computing is an emerging architectural paradigm driven by the sharp drop of technology costs followed by radically improved performance (commoditization). Social changes and economic advances have created a huge number of consumers and producers of various content artefacts (text, photo, music, video, etc.) representing huge user clouds and large communities (in the order of 100s of millions people). Highly abstracted, company operations are described as the interplay between people, machines and processes, providing either tangible goods or consumable services. Depending upon the business context, one component might be dominant over others, while each will contain something which we could label as ‘knowledge’. Approximately 75% of the economic activity in most advanced countries is created by service industries where knowledge is the primary resource or ingredient. Within the shift of emerging cloud computing and Web 2.0, Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) have to be reconsidered from more social and user-focused perspective. Knowledge gives distinctive capabilities to living creatures, with humans being at the top of the hierarchical tree of life. Tacit knowledge enables perception, reflection and action as the basic features of any intelligent behaviour. Technology, on the other hand, enables capturing and reuse of tacit knowledge in explicit form. Much of what is known as ‘knowledge management’ is about transforming tacit knowledge into explicit and vice-versa. Intuitively is clear that knowledge plays the key role in each and every part of the business enterprise. Thanks to knowledge, the enterprise will know more, will act better and react sooner in changing environment conditions, ultimately improving its performance and enabling it to show better behaviour and measurable improvements.

Keywords:

Cloud computing, knowledge management, enterprise 2.0, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, ILIAS.