Online Knowledge Bank System

The IOM office in London contacted Blueberry because it required an online knowledge bank system that all their offices across the world could access and use.

The system was required to:

• Provide reliable and up to date information on migrating people and the socio-economic conditions in the countries of their return.
• Provide information on individual cases when requested in an efficient and effective manner.
• Provide a knowledge base of reference ‘cases’ via a secure point-to-point messaging system which allows individual cases to be posted by users to other users in different regional offices in order to supply the requested information.

Called IRRiCO (Information on Return and Reintegration in Countries of Origin), the system was implemented by Blueberry within the constraints of a small budget and significantly discounted development costs due to IOM’s non-commercial status.

Blueberry’s solution was to create an application with two interfaces – an administration interface (which accounted for 80% of the project) and a small public interface consisting of two web pages. The administration pages form a ‘knowledge bank’ based on a point-to-point messaging system. That is, when a query is raised, it passes between originator and destination until the query is answered. The query is then added to the knowledge base of answered queries.

The website provides each regional office within the IOM group with their own homepage to publish information relating to the areas they cover, along with contact information. Various filters (such as case status, originator, etc) and a keyword filtering system enable the cases to be browsed by authorised users.

Blueberry’s design provides a complete online knowledge bank system for IOM. The IRRiCO system is completely web based, and uses the ASP.NET development platform running IIS 6.0 with an MS SQL database server backend.