Knowledge Management Application

Information and communication technologies (ICT) that support the handling of knowledge in organizations have been discussed for a long time. From the 1950s to the 1980s, systems that apply artificial intelligence (AI) technologies had a powerful impact on the conceptualization of knowledge, not only in the discipline computer science, but also in fields such as management science, organization science, or psychology. However, many business organizations that attempt to implement these technologies were frustrated by their comparably high complexity and the difficulties of applying them to business challenges. Thus, AI technologies survived only in specific application fields. In the 1990s, after a period of high attention to the increase of efficiency, organizations were faced with the transformation of the economy into a knowledge economy and its challenges to increase significantly the speed of innovation and to improve the way organizations handle (distributed) knowledge. For those countries that do not have (anymore) the possibility to exploit some form of natural resources, it is knowledge that creates wealth. Organizations strive to increase productivity of knowledge work. Knowledge work is creative work, it solves ill-structured problems in complex domains with high variety and many exceptions, and thus it requires a high level of skills and expertise from employees. The challenge is to design, implement, and maintain an organizational and ICT environment conducive for this type of work. The importance of knowledge work can be underlined by a recent study that showed that most jobs created in the United States between 1990 and 2000 in fact are jobs in the knowledge work sector (1). Keywords: architecture; knowledge; knowledge management; knowledge management system; knowledge process; process; service; strategy