Guide to Oracle Knowledge Management(OKM)

I wanted to write from a long time on OKM(Oracle Knowledge Management), Oracle Knowledge Management in laymen’s term is a customized version of search engine to organizational need. It can provide searches across multiple sources, major examples are word doc, PDF, Excel, Social Media & knowledge articles.

From my recent reading & the way I see the code level packaging of the application, the underlying application is from InQuira Inc. This product/Company was acquired by Oracle in 2011. It was further integrated with other Oracle products & was offered to customers as a complete call center solution.

This product has multiple application types/Components(I have used application types & components interchangeably), which are needed to be installed together in order to work together. I got a chance to drive the complete setup for this product. I personally liked this product, since it provides information to agents on their fingertips based on their profile setup. As an organization, if you have huge documentation & you are looking for contextual search with customized tuning then this is the product for you. It’s highly impossible to refer to any unorganized documentation, while the agent is answering customer inquiry.

Let us dive deeper into it, as per your business needs and how much your agents are comfortable in using reference documents during your call or answering an email-based query, you might have to go for Iconnect or Infocenter. Certainly, there are some other components that are always needed for your Iconnect or Infocenter. Below diagram will give you an idea which components of the product fit where & how they serve multiple needs.

Fig 1. High-Level OKM Components

Let us explore one component or app type one at a time, let us assume for some time your agents need to search relevant articles, documents within your call center agent facing application.

Iconnect

This is one of the ways where your agents can perform the searches on the documentation. Iconnect can seamlessly work with Siebel Contact Center, RightNow & CRM OnDemand which I am aware of. I don’t see much of an issue in integrating them with other products also since it uses a servlet based parameters and those can be passed from calling application, which is possible in most of the above applications.

The component internally uses runtimes to do get the search results on scored & ranked/tuned articles. Subsequently, each activity and event is passed to event router, which will continuously log the user & system events in the staging database. I haven’t shown any DB in the above diagram but will try to write another part where I will explain the deployment diagram in detail with all the system components.

This application can take multiple servlet parameters which calling applications can pass to authenticate/authorize users along with search parameters. This application component is not for standalone queries or searches.

Infocenter

The codebase for Infocenter & Iconnect is the same in almost all the functionality but the UI is advanced for Infocenter. It has a nice login screen with a channel configured as per the user setup. I will come to the channel part in later sections. This application serves the need of organizations in case you have standalone contextual search needs.

Infomanager

Infomanager is one of the critical pieces of OKM application. Most of the administrative activities are taken care of through this component. Here are some of the major activities you can carry in Infomanager & I have come across

• User management: — User setup, Group setup, Role setup
• Channel Creations
• Document/Article Management with workflow

Channels are nothing but a grouping of documents, articles, alerts under certain categories & user searches can be limited to those groups. It also provides the same search functionality as Iconnet and Infocenter.

Event router

This is a JMS based application component that collects events from all the three application components so that you send it to OKM analytics.

Intelligent Search

It is the main part of the entire OKM system

As shown in the below image, it has below components

1. The Natural Interaction Engine: The Natural Interaction Engine provides the runtime request-response processing functions.
2. The Content Processor: The Content Processor makes your site content available to the application by going through the documents.
3. The Semantic Index: The semantic index encodes semantic and location information for each document within the application content.
4. The Rules Engine: The Rules Engine operates at runtime to compare user questions with the set of Rules in the Dictionary.
5. The Dictionary: The Dictionary, which contains the hierarchy of semantic relationships that define the words and phrases used in your business environment, It helps you getting a relevant document for your business terms.

Tools to all the above activities are done using

• System Manager
• Advanced Configuration Facility
• Oracle Language Workbench

Conclusion

Overall for any organization that has knowledge spread across multiple places & it needs to be made available for your agents on their fingertips. I see this is one of the products available from oracle & it will solve your operational needs for contextual searches.

I have a Udemy course for you guys to get in detail about each of these components & in detailed information related to each physical as a well logical component.

https://www.udemy.com/complete-guide-to-oracle-knowledge-management/?couponCode=SACHIN.KAPALE