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,