Montague Fellows in Knowledge Base Publishing
Montague Fellows are mid-career business information professionals who
have completed the interdisciplinary course of study described below.
Through a real-world project, they demonstrate the ability to help organizations
leverage information assets across functional and organizational boundaries.
Fellows are key players in the quest to balance
the requirement for security and reliability with the need for speed,
adaptability, and usability. They understand the language of IT and recognize
the value of standards, documentation, and project management discipline.
At the same time, they know how to design efficient information workflows,
organize information in a knowledgebase, support end-user developers,
and increase knowledge worker satisfaction and productivity.
Fellows are grounded, either by education or experience,
in one of the information disciplines, such as library science, computer
science, journalism, technical writing, corporate communications, or training/development.
In addition, they often have experience in a second discipline or corporate
function, such as R&D, marketing, sales, manufacturing, or business
management. They are typically good communicators, modelers, teachers,
and translators.
Once they complete the following curriculum, Fellows
can be licensed to teach the Montague Institute's Knowledge Base Publishing
courses. Licensing offers the opportunity to customize the curriculum
and reduces the organization's total education costs.
Curriculum
The Knowledge
Base Publishing curriculum is a series of seven Web-based courses.
The courses are designed for teams of four to six people who create a
prototype knowledge base using an online
Lab. Participants
are guided through the process of selecting a project, analyzing its requirements,
and gathering relevant metadata from existing corporate applications.
Data can be submitted in Excel format for importing or entered manually
using Web-based forms. As participants move from one course to the next,
they enhance the knowledge structures they have already created. For example,
in the first course, team members create a controlled vocabulary. In subsequent
courses, they add basic thesaurus relationships and eventually other kinds
of relationships.
The Fellowship program is designed for a team
of six people. Working as a team enhances the interdisciplinary learning
process, reduces the amount of work required of each person, increases
the amount of Lab time available, and provides continuity in case an employee
is transferred or terminated.
Required courses
Each participant is required to take the following
courses in the order they are listed:
Introduction to Knowledge
Base Publishing — How Knowledge Base Publishing works and
how it can increase productivity. Introduction
to relational databases and data transfer techniques. How to create
a controlled vocabulary and document archive.
Knowledge domain analysis
— How to analyze a problem or business process. How to define
a project and describe in detail the relevant people, content, and processes.
Creating and using business
taxonomies — How to create an organization scheme (taxonomy)
for a business application.
Information modeling
& metadata management — How to adapt, extend, and integrate
existing technical, organizational, and topical information models.
Integrating taxonomies —
How to bridge interdisciplinary conceptual gaps with cross references
between different vocabularies: e.g. between R&D and marketing or
physicians and patients. How to standardize personal, organizational,
and product names.
Metadata and search
— How and when to use a full text search engine in conjunction
with other retrieval and navigation tools. How to integrate a business
taxonomy with a metadata-aware search engine.
Optional advanced courses
Participants can take one or more of the following
courses to complete the curriculum requirements.
Organizing and managing
images — How to create and modify
an organization scheme for electronic images. How to set up an efficient
image archive. Manipulating images for print, Web, and database publishing.
Return on investment
The primary return on investment is an increase in user productivity.
Employees, customers, investors, and other stakeholders work faster and
more efficiently when their information tools are tailored to their work
style and environment. As a by-product, organizations can experience lower
overall IT-related costs, greater agility in responding to change, and
higher adoption rates for new services.
Companies can further amortize their investment in
employee productivity by licensing Fellows to teach the Knowledge Base
Publishing curriculum. Benefits are lower training costs and a customized
learning experience.
Senior Fellows
Fellows can become qualified as Senior Fellows by successfully completing
the specifications for a custom version of the Knowledge Base (Lab). Senior
Fellows serve one-year, rotating terms as members of the Montague Institute
Advisory Board, where they provide input on the Institute's research agenda
and service offerings.
Created on February 22, 2006 l Updated on
March 26, 2006
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