Mark Francis Jaeger

PROBLEM: I need mechanisms for enabling knowledge transfer between the Java Enterprise Edition developers of a State Medicaid claims processing system and the state's IT staff who will have to maintain it.

CONTEXT: CNSI has a contract to replace the State of Michigan's 35 year old COBOL Medicaid claimis processing system with a HIPAA-compliant system. As part of the contract, CNSI must provide for knowledge transfer. That transfer will allow State employees to maintain and enhance the CNSI codebase as Medicaid requirements change. Any mechnaism for doing the knowledge transfer has to have low overhead, a shallow learning curve, and not require much time to maintain (or to update when the participants want to share). It has to work even though the CNSI developers are on the East Coast and the State folks are in the Great Lakes area.

FORCES:

    * Neither the developers nor the state's IT folks are used to engaging in successful knowledge transfer
    * A significant amount of money rides on success, not to mention the long-term viability of this Medicaid payment system

SOLUTION: Would a wiki prove useful for this, perhaps as the basis for a Community of Practice? Ideas are welcome.

RESULTING CONTEXT: What happens.

RATIONALE: Why it works. [I keep trying to make this an academic treatise, with footnotes and all -- that may be a bad idea]

Author: Mark Francis Jaeger, 9 November 2006

Originator: Somebody, not the author, who discovered the idea.