**4. Drupal**

12 Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH

6. Knowledge management provides platforms, tools and processes to ensure integration of an organisation's knowledge base. Through knowledge management structures such as taxonomies, knowledge management can ensure the integration of the corporate knowledge base. This enables staff members to have an integrated view of what knowledge is available, where it can be accessed, and also what the gaps in the knowledge base are. This is extremely important in the innovation process to ensure that knowledge as resource is utilized to its maximum benefit and to ensure that knowledge is not recreated

7. Knowledge management assists in identifying gaps in the knowledge base and provides processes to fill the gaps in order to aid innovation. Through the structured provision of access to knowledge, knowledge management provides an overview of what is available in the organisation. This allows the organisation to understand in which areas knowledge is lacking and to systematically build the knowledge base in these areas. The organisation may do this through the innovation program itself if the gaps are in strategic areas, but it may also do it through knowledge management processes or operational business

8. Knowledge management assists in building competencies required in the innovation process. Through knowledge accessibility and knowledge flow, staff members are able to increase their skills levels and knowledge both formally and informally. An increase in skills can improve the quality of innovation. The flow of knowledge across functional boundaries ensures that a wider base of knowledge is available to employees than only the knowledge they use in their day-to-day activities. Employees therefore have a wider frame of reference of the context in which they work and will therefore be able to innovate more efficiently. Knowledge management also provides a culture of knowledge sharing and accessibility of knowledge, creating an environment conducive to skills and competency

9. Knowledge management provides organisational context to the body of knowledge in the organisation. Every organisation's corporate memory is unique. The structures provided to organize and retrieve knowledge from the corporate knowledge base will therefore be providing a unique context to each particular organisational knowledge base. Provision of organisational context is critical in the innovation process, as innovation in the organisation also takes place within a very specific business context. Knowledge management assists in

10. Knowledge management assists in steady growth of the knowledge base through gathering and capturing of explicit and tacit knowledge. It also assists specifically in addressing gaps in the knowledge base through specific acquisition of knowledge in those areas where gaps exist, or through knowledge creation and innovation itself. This in turn feeds the innovation process through creation of a much broader knowledge base that is available as resource for the innovation process. The tacit knowledge base also grows

11. Knowledge management provides a knowledge-driven culture within which innovations can be incubated. Knowledge sharing is enhanced by a culture where the role of knowledge, knowledge management, innovation and creative thinking is encouraged. Most knowledge management programs have a strong knowledge culture element through which an organisational culture of knowledge generation and sharing is emphasized. This benefits innovation programs as it provides knowledge as resource,

in the innovation process.

building, which aids innovation.

identifying and understanding this organisational context.

through building of skills due to the availability of knowledge.

processes.

During the implementation phase of the computerised personnel management system (CPMS) project at Directorate, we found that the available innovation management software did not provide much ICT solutions with regard to an integrated knowledge network. The literature also had only few successful projects which had integrated knowledge networks as a part of their web technologies. The few available web technologies, we found, offer remote connectivity, content management, media-rich environments, community building and social networking.

All these technologies had relevance to the nature and scope of the requirements of the Information Systems project definition of Directorate in terms of its integrated knowledge management work processes and value chain. The literature supports the view that an organisation's integrated knowledge network is *". . . a cradle for Innovation in a modern environment, and the exact features many of these technologies boast"* [Gous & Schutte (2009)]. We found that the latest web technologies which were noteworthy, are mainly open-source content management system, among these are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal [Buytaert (n.d.)], which support content management. We also found that the standard release of Drupal, known as "Drupal core", contains basic features common to most Content Management Systems (CMS). These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts, administration menus, RSS-feeds, customizable layout, flexible account privileges, logging, a blogging system, an Internet forum, and options to create an interactive community website [Gous & Schutte (2009)] We concur with Gous & Schutte (2009) that "*Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behaviour to be added by third parties. For this reason, Drupal is sometimes described as a "*Content Management Framework." *Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic web site installation and administration."*

At Directorate, the system was designed to support the integrated work carried out by the personnel administration, recruitment, and placement divisions. Internal users of the system were intended to be able to store up-to-date information about public officers in their ministries, and keep track of policy development provided by Directorate through the online Policy Database. In order to meet this requirement, some of the positive and negative considerations of Drupal are set out next

1. Positive aspects of Drupal:


Fig. 5. A multilayer approach for the systems requirement (Gous & Schutte (2009))

players using the system, have now become occasional users;

and independent departments that were responsible;

requirement, two other issues came to light, namely:

in the Establishment Register; and

the Natural Evolution of Knowledge Management Systems

areas of responsibility; and

\* what must be done, and \* who is responsible.

three-fold:

1. The Recruitment, Personnel Administration, and Training Divisions, which were the major

<sup>409</sup> The Liberation of Intellectual Capital Through

2. The Manpower Planning Division owns the responsibility to create and change positions

3. The Industrial Class Division, which was already decentralized only, needs the system for enquiries. For the ministries, however, there was a big increase in usage and responsibility to keep the computer system up-to-date. The ministries now have complete ownership of the system except for the creation and changing of positions which still belongs to the Manpower Planning Division. The effect that decentralisation has had on the CPMS is

• where the system had one owner, responsible for the usage and ensuring that the information in the system was being kept up-to-date, there were now 18 ministries

• no roles and responsibilities were formally clarified, which created confusion. This confusion forced the project to stop its planned work on the HRM Workflow Management System (WMS), as a WMS needs a very disciplined and focused environment, with every-one concerned knowing exactly what were their roles and

• system training was not only required at the Directorate level anymore, but at also at ministries' as well. This necessitated the change in scope and focus of the implementation of the CPMS project. For the project team to successfully implement the system at the ministries' level, it was imperative to ensure that the HR processes used by them were integrated with the CPMS. In the process of identifying this

**–** ownership of the HR processes (personnel actions). The need that was jointly identified for the project, Directorate and the ministries, was a requirement for a process manual with each HR process defined where the following is clarified:

This process manual could then be used to compile the operational manual by adding 'how' each step must be done. The key benefit from this manual is that it would enable Directorate, and the identified trainers to teach and train all the ministries in what must be done and

**–** whether the ministries had any formalised processes to build on, and

	- Limited availability of themes
	- Steeper learning curve than many other CMS packages

Despite Drupal's steep learning curve, it creates a framework that offers extendibility far beyond most other CMS packages and is supported by a vibrant and helpful community of knowledgeable developers and users. Drupal includes a number of features and extensions (Taxonomy, Organic Groups, Content Construction Kit, Views) that allow developers to create highly customized web-based community platforms. Drupal was therefore chosen as the basis of the proposed Information System.
