Towards a Combined Approach to Metadata in Corporate Knowledge Management: A Case Study of GE Healthcare

Abstract

Through interviews with representatives from GE Healthcare, we determined that a central problem of their current knowledge management system is users' inability to effectively retrieve the documents they need in order to carry out the everyday business activities of the corporation. We propose a three-pronged approach to resolving the problem, from a user-, data-, and system-centred perspective. From the users' perspective, we conducted user-based usability studies to confirm and identify the key problem. For our data-centred approach, we developed a new Dublin Core-compatible metadata schema that has the following four key characteristics: compatibility with existing practices, specificity to the corporation's needs, simplicity to facilitate easy adoption and flexibility to evolve as the corporation grows and changes. From a system-centred perspective, we developed a new search interface for GE Healthcare that incorporates our proposed metadata schema to improve the effectiveness of the information search.