Case Study: Banco BCR
Knowledge Management and Architecture, Intranet Development, Enterprise Search
www.bancobcr.com
BCR is the second-largest state-owned bank in Costa Rica. It has existed for over 130 years and provides a broad range of financial services, including retail banking.
The Challenge
BCR has its institutional technical knowledge distributed in an unstructured fashion among myriad documents in their intranet. It needed to begin to consolidate and structure this knowledge, and improve its capacity for retaining technical knowledge after personnel turn-over. BCR investigated possible ways of addressing the problem of knowledge management without making a large up-front investment. InterNexo partnered with a local IT firm to research and implement a low-cost, proof-ofconcept solution to solve BCR’s knowledge management needs.
InterNexo's Solution
Kowledge Management (KM) Architecture
Validated BCR’s idea of using Concept Maps. Evaluated initial requirements, developed proofof- concepts to test different knowledge modeling tools vis-à-vis requirements. Researched and evaluated KM solutions, as well as full-text search products. Created enterprise-wide KM structure & architecture that included knowledge creation, documentation and repositories, and knowledge sharing processes.
Knowledge Management (KM) Implementation and Intranet Integration
Proposed, designed, customized and implemented a web-based knowledge base platform using open-source and commercial solutions.
Proposed and implemented Google Search Appliance as the back-end for enterprise-wide fulltext search, and worked with BCR to customize their existing Microsoft-based intranet platform to be GSA-friendly.
User Interface Design
Designed and implemented a new user interface for the web-based knowledge base platform, providing a portal that integrates different KB instances (e.g., Q/A, help desk, auditing) with full-text document search.
Innovation
Introduced BCR to cost-effective LAMP platform, and integrated it with enterprise full-text
search (GSA).
Created a formal design for BCR’s KM architecture, applicable across the enterprise.
The Impact
Middle- and upper-management has become aware of the need and importance of formal knowledge management approaches.
With a modest investment, BCR quickly obtained results with a fully functional, easy to use,
proof-of-concept system that has allowed for early adopters to incorporate existing knowledge
into an enterprise-wide searchable platform. Additionally, users can search through
unstructured text documents that are scattered across many servers.
Next steps include the implementation of a definitive, full-scale KM platform.
