NWRB staff recently developed and launched their own Intranet to help enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing. One key feature of the Intranet is the Water Permit Knowledge-base that aims to solve problems with the water permit process.
Prior to the development Water Permit Knowledge-base, the water permit process has been receiving customer complaints. The process took several years to complete, some as long as 4 years. Both customers and NWRB staff encountered difficulty when trying to track the current status of an application. Many applications often got lost and the customers had to fill up new forms all over again.
NWRB, with the help of Resource Persons and Mentors, formed a KM team to map the process, identify redundant and unnecessary steps, and recommended several improvements to the process. The KM team also worked with Mentors to build the Water Permit Knowledge-base. The online Knowledge-base provides a central venue for anyone inside the NWRB office to check the status of any application. It also clearly shows who the responsible persons and departments are for each step of the permit process.
Management has since endorsed the KM team’s recommendations and the KM team is targetting other organizational bottlenecks to solve. A kiosk will be provided in the library to help increase access to the Water Permit Knowledge-base. This kiosk will be open to the public who visit the library.
This effort was developed through a knowledge management workshop sponsored by PAHRDF. The TSP was Center for Conscious Living Foundation Inc with Dig It All Solutions Inc as the IT partner. The Intranet Knowledge-base was developed using Drupal, an open source content management platform.
