In today’s increasingly complex and transparent global environment, the board of directors is required to balance short-term pressures with developing high performing, trustworthy and sustainable organizations. Recruiting directors with the relevant experience and expertise to provide guidance, support and inspiration for the organization is critical to achieving this balance. Korn Ferry Canada is a leadership talent consulting and executive search firm that provides a range of board advisory services including recruiting, assessment and board effectiveness. With offices located across unique and diverse geographies, regional information silos and ad-hoc processes have emerged. This project investigates existing workflows and resources and compares them against the team’s information requirements. The Knowledge Management solution includes recommendations for improving the quality of candidate and client information being accessed, captured, shared and reused for board recruiting. If implemented, the Knowledge Management solution will improve operational efficiency for Korn Ferry Canada’s board practice team.

The Sylvan Way branch, located in Bremerton, Washington, is the largest branch of the Kitsap Regional Library system, and is one of two branches serving the Bremerton area. For this Capstone project, we partnered with KRL to discover untapped patron communities and relationships by analyzing area demographics while utilizing recent assessments of KRL and other library systems. Additionally, we focused on ways to create and strengthen the library’s relationship with the area’s two largest employers, the Department of Defense (comprising of Naval Base Kitsap, Naval Hospital Bremerton, and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard) and Harrison Medical Center. As result of our analysis, the Sylvan Way branch is poised to offer more support in the form of strengthened partnerships and more tailored programs to their existing and new patrons.

As an architecture firm, NBBJ has had Swedish Hospital Medical Center as a long term client since 1936. This has resulted in almost 80 years of architectural records, which have design, legal, technical, intellectual, cultural, and historic value for both the architectural firm and the hospital. NBBJ recently moved their architectural records to a secure off-site location which has opened up space but increases the waiting period for architects who need to access the drawings for current projects. For this project we selected, digitized, and publicized within the firm a selection of architectural drawings related to projects with Swedish Hospital Medical Center. We then created a video to promote the digitized records and documentation for future digitization projects. This project strengthens the working relationship between the hospital and the architecture firm and ensures that the drawings will continue to serve as a means for inspiration for many years to come.

Everyone has something they can donate to charity, but many do not have the time. Existing applications that aim to make charity convenient have focused on monetary donations while neglecting physical donations. Non-profit organizations need physical items that many individuals own, but do not use. CherryTime is a web application that seeks to enable anyone with limited time to donate physical items. With CherryTime, donations take minutes. Users can find nearby donation sites, give to charity, and continue their day. The list of sites is community-provided and community-maintained. Non-profit organizations can specify exactly what they need and monitor the health of their donation sites. CherryTime gives users a lens into the needs of their community and gives them the power to make a difference.

The proliferation of Internet connected devices in the home has brought with it a disparate array of user interfaces. Use of multiple devices often means changing from one interface to another, yielding a disjointed experience. Further, a massive amount of information is collected and stored in these devices. Cisco Dash is a web application that serves as a single location to view and use Internet of Everything devices. It also provides an enterprise-grade analytics platform to give users the capability of making smart living decisions at home.

A common problem facing many organizations today is the lack of a centralized knowledge library. One such organization is the City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development. Often, data is needed to support updates to Seattle’s 20-year growth plan. This data is usually found buried in Indicator Project reports, scaled data-gathering projects pertaining to civic topics such as Arts & Culture, Education, Housing and Land Use. These Indicator Project reports are stored in various locations throughout the department. Locating the correct data is often met with a high level of difficulty and frustration, due to lack of data availability, conflicting data and the inability to locate relevant data in a timely manner. Our project proposes to resolve these problems by building a centralized data library with an extensive taxonomy and metadata structure designed to enable fast, easy and accurate retrieval of important city demographic data.

With ConnectMe, gamers no longer have to find random strangers online to play with. Instead, they can find local gamers that have similar gaming interests and abilities. They can then meet up on, or off-line, have fun playing games, and even make new friends. Many people play multiplayer games online nowadays, whether it’s with their friends, family or even random strangers. However, many of these users would like to meet new gamers that have similar gaming interests. ConnectMe enables users to connect with other individuals with similar interests by allowing users to create a customized profile, send private messages, and add friends--all essential to building a community. What differentiates us from any other matchmaking system is that we have a localized find feature that allows gamers to find others around them who they can then meet and play with.

The universe of metadata standards is expansive, diverse, and continuously evolving. My project supported the creation of KAOS (Knowledge-Advancing Organization Systems), an online repository for metadata schemes and schemas of all forms, functions, and levels of complexity - including controlled vocabularies, thesauri, web ontologies, subject lists, classification schemes, indexing languages, descriptive frameworks, conceptual models, and more. After exploratory research into data ingest, storage, migration, transformation, analysis, and visualization, I designed, tested, and implemented a proof-of-concept infrastructure and workflow that lays the foundation for development to begin on a larger scale. When fully launched, the KAOS platform will use linked data to visually represent relationships among metadata standards and show changes in those standards over time. As a centralized access point to the wide world of metadata vocabularies, KAOS serves as a valuable resource for information professionals in any domain or industry.

Nowadays, nobody’s schedule is the same and a significant amount of time is wasted trying to find common openings for group meetings. While there have been other services created to try and address this problem, they have major issues including poor user interface and a lengthy data entry process. Coordinate was created by our team to solve this problem and address the critical flaws in the existing tools. Coordinate is an online scheduling platform that allows users to quickly organize schedules together to find meeting times for the entire group. After receiving a link from the host, all a user needs to do is use our click-and-drag entry calendar to indicate their availability and our system will identify the optimal time for the group to meet. By simplifying event scheduling, we hope to allow the groups to have more time to improve their event, rather than wasting it comparing schedules.