Reference no: EM132732518
Company Background
Marja-Liisa Rinnekangas has been practising as arts professional and private entrepreneur since 1989. During three decades, the areas of practice have included variety of areas of creating visual arts such as painting, sculptures, art graphics, space arts, event 36 decoration, postal cards and photography, as well as providing teaching and other forms of arts consultancy in drawing, painting, art graphics, advertisement and colour psychology, among others. She has held over 100 private art exhibitions, and about 80 co-held art exhibitions. She has taught approximately 5000-6000 students, both privately as well as in public education organisations. Furthermore, she has been active in local art society activities. Given the length of professional experience, she has gained extensive knowledge on various fields of visual arts.
Her lines of business of organisation can be roughly divided into categories: arts creation (or, art production) and art consultancy. The art consultancy encompasses variety of activities particularly in teaching art which effectively is about teaching arts creation by using specific techniques and styles of painting and sculpturing, for instance.
Each of the processes vary in degree of complexity and specialisation involved: for instance, arts creation by using paper clay technique requires degree of training by doing with phases involved, guided by detailed instructions from a teacher to ensure the expected outcome. As another example, the creation of art graphics requires hands-on practicing with relevant tools like printing press and plates, with the teacher showing how the 37 entire printing processes with various phases is conducted. Setting up an art exhibition requires visual sense in placing the items according to the facilities available while theming of the exhibition and items. Furthermore, the defined top categories are interconnected, as skills and expertise in arts creation are acquired first in order to be able to provide the variety of arts consultancy skills in turn. This has impacts in defining the nature of the organisation and its primary line of business: while the arts creation encompasses wide range of activities, it is the arts consultancy where they are put in use i.e. in teaching in particular. Given that the activities in arts consultancy form the major part of the two high-level categories, the organisation can be described as functioning primarily in the field of arts consultancy.
Implementations of Knowledge Management
Based on the information provided by Marja, one feasible option for implementing the system would be to use an existing solution option which fulfils the requirements. One of such options could be Microsoft's SharePoint Online, since it can be integrated with the existing Microsoft based tools which are used by the owner. SharePoint Online can be used in implementing a scalable knowledge management system based on cloud computing, providing dynamically sufficient memory and processing resources dynamically for hosting the converted knowledge forms. Once the system has been introduced as specified on SharePoint's structure and the relevant sites and libraries are in place, the system can be taken into use for its original purpose. The converted knowledge in various formats (documents, images, video) can be uploaded to the system as specified in "Document Library" and "Media libraries".
Once the knowledge management system has been rolled out, that is, the system has been created and the converted knowledge for retention has been stored in the system as expected, the consecutive maintenance of the system and knowledge management activities takes place. This is to ensure that the introduced knowledge management system will not get reduced into to the status of a static knowledge maintenance repository. On the other hand, given the small size of the organisation where such responsibilities will continue to be shouldered on one or two persons only, the activities should be scaled to be manageable i.e. not taking too much time and effort in respect to the main activities of the organisation.
Use SWOT analysis to evaluate Share Point online as used by Marja as a Knowledge Management tool. You can make assumptions on certain SWOT factors.