While the Air Force uses knowledge management systems and collaboration platforms, remaining compliant with government, health and privacy regulations is a challenge, said David Sanchez of the Air Force Medical Service.

Sanchez spoke Nov. 17 during a keynote at KM World, a knowledge management conference in Washington, D.C.

It's important the agencies consider these challenges when they're developing a platform, because if something goes wrong, the KM system will be shut down or halted, said Sanchez. Any content associated with a name or address is sensitive, any information on arms or weapons and any health information is also highly regulated.  

Records retention is also an issue: The Air Force has over 5,200 retention codes and a document cannot be destroyed unless it has a retention code assigned to it, said Sanchez. All content also has to be e-discovery and Freedom Of Information Act-request ready.

Getting a grip on who is accessing what and whether they're following archiving guidelines requires a fair amount of metadata tagging, Sanchez said--but there are problems there, too.

"What we've found is that we had insufficient metadata," said Sanchez. "And we had incorrect content types being applied. Since content types drive workflow we're unable to workflow these documents. The limiting factor here is the human being."

Sanchez is helping launch a new platform which takes compliance directives into consideration and minimizes human involvement wherever possible. Air Force Human Services Integration program uses existing metadata taxonomies for tagging, which are added to uploaded documents automatically rather than relying on the user to correctly tag it. Then the system goes back to label the content type and assesses whether that document can be on a KM platform or if it should just refer back to the sensitive document on a server with a security measure built around it, Sanchez said.

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