Process-oriented knowledge management

Making knowledge available to the right worker at the right time is vital for building and sustaining an organization's competencies. Many organizations have been engaged in developing knowledge repositories as a means by which knowledge is made explicit, stored, and shared within the organization. These repositories typically store documents with knowledge embedded in them, such as memos and reports, or they may be discussion databases. Early experience, however, showed that few users contribute knowledge into repositories, or search for needed knowledge from them. This behavior has been attributed to the lack of a knowledge sharing culture, and additionally to the burden of having to take extra steps outside of work to update the repository, and the difficulty in using the structure of the repository to locate information. Drawing upon the experience of prior knowledge management projects and theories of knowledge sharing, this thesis proposes a design of a knowledge management system called KnowledgeScope. The idea behind KnowledgeScope is to integrate workflow support with a knowledge repository, enabling knowledge capture and retrieval as an organizational process proceeds in the KnowledgeScope system environment. At the heart of the KnowledgeScope design is a process meta-model that describes the elements and relationships in an organizational process. The model is sliced into four perspectives that reflects different users' knowledge needs and then used to structure the knowledge in the repository. It is also used for defining a workflow model to drive workflow support for the organizational process. Three case studies in real-life organizational settings were performed to apply the process meta-model, to build a knowledge management system using the KnowledgeScope design, and finally to implement the knowledge management system for an organizational process. The experience, lessons learned and user feedback from these case studies were incorporated into a system development methodology called KnowledgeWare. KnowledgeWare enables an organization to integrate knowledge management practices into their business processes with the support of information technology.