B-KIDE: a framework and a tool for business process-oriented knowledge infrastructure development

Abstract

The need for an effective management of knowledge is gaining increasing recognition in today's economy. To acknowledge this fact, new promising and powerful technologies have emerged from industrial and academic research. With these innovations maturing, organizations are increasingly willing to adapt such new knowledge management technologies to improve their knowledge-intensive businesses. However, the successful application in given business contexts is a complex, multidimensional challenge and a current research topic. Therefore, this contribution addresses this challenge and introduces a framework for the development of business process-supportive, technological knowledge infrastructures. While business processes represent the organizational setting for the application of knowledge management technologies, knowledge infrastructures represent a concept that can enable knowledge management in organizations. The B-KIDE Framework introduced in this work provides support for the development of knowledge infrastructures that comprise innovative knowledge management functionality and are visibly supportive of an organization's business processes. The developed B-KIDE Tool eases the application of the B-KIDE Framework for knowledge infrastructure developers. Three empirical studies that were conducted with industrial partners from heterogeneous industry sectors corroborate the relevance and viability of the introduced concepts. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTIONKnowledge in modern economies is increasingly playing a key role in achieving organizational success. Knowledge management (KM) as a concept and a scientific discipline emerged to acknowledge this fact. Three main reasons can be identified for this development (Sivan, 2001): (1) need: today's information technology-enabled organizations have to process and make use of ever more information in ever-decreasing time cycles; (2) recognition of need: organizations increasingly recognize the need for and the importance of conscious management of knowledge (Matzler et al., 2004); (3) availability of KM instruments: past research activities (e.g., Maurer and Tochtermann, 2002;Maier and Remus, 2002;Lehner, 2002;Lindstaedt et al., 2002;Rollett, 2003) and product innovations (e.g., Hyperwave, 2004;Livelink, 2004;Lotus, 2004) in the field of knowledge management promise to provide sound instruments for addressing current KM challenges and enabling the management of knowledge in organizational settings. These three observations represent insightful explanations for the emergence of knowledge management.Practicing knowledge management in organizations can be achieved through the development and implementation of knowledge infrastructures (Sivan,

KnowFlow - A Hybrid Approach to Identifying and Visualizing Distributed Knowledge Work Practices

“…To a certain extent, knowledge management is concerned with understanding social relations within communities [25], but also introduces complementary modeling dimensions, such as knowledge-, organizational and technological aspects [29]. Within the knowledge management domain, knowledge work analysis can be regarded a research branch of its own which is concerned with the descriptive modeling of socio-technological real world systems (or "object systems" [5]).…”

“…Key issues in this domain include the multi-dimensional identification and visualization of knowledge work practices. However, approaches in this domain typically are labor-intensive and rely on a co-location of analysts and investigated actors (such as B-KIDE [29,30] or ARIS(KM) [2]) and therefore are not well equipped for being applied in distributed settings.…”

“…Based on [29] and [28], figure 1 introduces relevant roles and respective tasks of knowledge infrastructure development projects. Knowledge infrastructures here are regarded to represent computer systems that support the execution of collaborative, knowledge intensive work.…”

“…Key issues in this domain include the multi-dimensional identification and visualization of knowledge work practices. However, approaches in this domain typically are labor-intensive and rely on a co-location of analysts and investigated actors (such as B-KIDE [29,30] or ARIS(KM) [2]) and therefore are not well equipped for being applied in distributed settings.So while social network analysis on one hand provides suitable concepts for conducting analysis among a set of distributed actors (through e.g. automated log analysis), it lacks consideration of necessary modeling dimensions and appropriate mechanisms to handle the huge amount of data to successfully aid the process of developing CSCW systems.…”

Professional Knowledge Management

“…These approaches extend process modelling by means for describing knowledge-related process perspectives(e.g., knowledge required to enact an activity,orknowledge flows between activities), by means for integrating knowledgemanagement oriented activities or sub-processes (likei nformation retrievala ctivities or editorial sub-processes for lessons-learned documentation), or even by means for finegrained description of knowledge-creation, knowledge-retrieval, or knowledge-transfer activities. Theya lso use knowledge-oriented process analysis for designing organizational knowledge infrastructures [ST05].…”