Innovation-friendly Organization

ShareNet is an innovative ArsDigita's knowledge management system (KMS) used by  Siemens. ShareNet attempts to capture the knowledge and experience of Siemen's many dispersed sales and marketing units around the globe, making it available to all.

ArsDigita's knowledge management system (KMS) provides a structure in which Siemens' employees can record valuable information for use by other employees. Opening both formal and informal communication channels, the KMS has proven itself as a robust, scalable system.

Siemens needed information on ShareNet to be presented in context. Having other users' feedback on a piece of information can make all the difference in determining if it will be useful in another situation. This type of information does not usually fit in traditional form fields. ArsDigita's professional services developers overcame this by leveraging ready-made KMS features such as discussion forums and chat rooms. The developers also made extensive use of the KMS general commenting function, which allows you to add comments to any piece of data in the system, or to reference related data. This provides searchers with a tight grid of results which they can evaluate based on related items and other users' comments.

By providing information as a mixture of both formal data and informal commentary, the ArsDigita KMS made ShareNet into a powerful service ‒ central to Siemens ICN global business operations. Siemens expanded the use of ShareNet into its other business divisions as well.