Knowledge House Information System project updates

On Thursday 5^th November KHIS 2.0 went live at Knowledge House and replaced the KHIS 1.5. system.

A training manual has been drafted and once content feedback has been given by the KHIS Champions it will be printed and issued to each site alongside a Training Champions session. Each site has nominated 1-2 ‘training champions’ who will be trained in a 2 hour session with KHIS developers Rachel Armstrong and Paul Cranner. It is then expected that these champions can be the initial point of contact at each site for any KHIS 2.0 user enquiries.

In the interim, users have been giving general feedback to Rachel and Paul to iron out any initial teething problems.  The major go-live issue was that of speed – users were highlighting that the system was initially running too slowly to be useable. Therefore it was decided that any data in the database which is marked as ‘project closed’ with a creation date of over 24months would be archived and a ‘search the archive’ functionality be updated to all searches. The database has also be transferred to a more powerful server and feedback has been positive, with users commenting on increased speed.

Knowledge House will update on progress and KHIS development after the Training Champions session.

At the beginning of the project, the trial project faced a major issue when it’s original trial partner was no longer able to take part in the project. Fortunately, Knowledge House has been able to identify another potential partner and discussed with them expected benefits of the trial. ONE Inward Investment has now agreed to partner the project.

Knowledge House has worked in partnership with ONE Inward Investment since 2006 to support and attract investors to the region by promoting the expertise in the regions universities. The enquiries which Knowledge House receive via ONE are not standard commercial enquiries, and are handled in a very different way to the standard enquiries we receive from businesses in the region. The project and enquiries are managed by Knowledge House using an excel spreadsheet in combination with some functionality on KHIS 1.5 and reports are generated from the spreadsheet. In order to attract and secure Inward Investment into the North East the Investment and Aftercare Team also require detailed, up-to-date, sector specific information on past, current, and proposed research undertaken at the region’s five Universities and any other relevant higher education provider.

With this in mind there is a need to develop a bespoke project management system to support the Inward Investment users. There is also the potential to allow the ONE strategic account management team to have access to the system and circulate enquiries. Currently ONE use a system called Sales Logix to handle enquiries. It is thought that linking this system with KHIS 2.0 or at least having the functionality to cross-reference projects across the two systems would be useful for tracking the progress of enquiries.