National Mediation Board
In 2003, Ken Megill first came in contact with the National Mediation Board (NMB), a government agency reporting directly to the President. They were looking for software to manage their records. He attended a demonstration of a software product he had helped develop and at the end, said “there must be a better way to do this” than to have every small agency buy and install a software package, retain consultants and hire staff for a cost of a quarter to half a million dollars every year.
Why can't someone provide software, hardware and consulting services as a package at a reasonable fixed price? At the time, cloud computing was unknown and information technology companies were accustomed to make big profits by selling software. Others sold consulting service. Still others ran the software.
Drawing on his work with the Air Force to create an integrated digital environment, he approached the leadership of NMB to try a different approach. Working with the agency and Scan-Optics, a manufacturing company looking for new lines of business, he put together software, hardware and data storage and by amortizing the investment of a period of five years was able to offer an affordable service to NMB. In 2005, he created Knowledge Applications Services (KAS) and take over the work. In 2009 KAS was awarded a competitive five-year contract to manage the corporate memory and knowledge store of the National Mediation Board.
Further information about NMB can be found at http://www.nmb.gov From this web site you can access the Knowledge Store, a “library” managed by KAS of publicly available documents.
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