Evaluation of Application Embedded Knowledge Migration Issues.

As computing has matured, more organizations are purchasing best of breed applications as opposed to developing them in-house. From a Knowledge Management point of view, the organizations are renting the use of knowledge that is embedded in the applications. The organizations may own the data but the host application company owns the intellectual capital that creates the knowledge. For any of a number of reasons organizations will have to move to new applications and in turn new knowledge. It is assumed that the organization will be able to migrate current data and print reports but it does not own the original base knowledge. The issue is to understand what knowledge is imbedded in the old application and how can it be integrated into the new system. As the knowledge is inventoried, the new vendor can then determine if the knowledge will be available in the system. After that determination, the user might have to decide if the information is obsolete or possibly lost data. The migration issue also can put the onus of development on the end user. Consider the conversation of the developer and the end user where the end user asks for a feature that the developer has not seen. The end user is looking for features in the old system and the developer is going to say that it is up to the end user to tell them what they want. The issue is that the end user may now know what they want. The knowledge embedded in the code of the old application provided the information. The information basis is the intellectual property of the outgoing vendor and they may not have any reason to work with the incoming vendor. The paper will evaluate migration issues based on a case study of the migration of a financial application for a small city. The paper will also discuss some of the assumptions of knowledge management and a knowledge inventory to help an organization prepare to move applications to a new vendor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]