Enhancing business process management with knowledge

Abstract

Both Business Process Management and Knowledge Management are fully developed, autonomous disciplines. However, for an organization to utilize them to a maximum, these two have to be introduced in a coordinated way. This is a subject of Business Process Oriented Knowledge Management. On the technical level, we can talk about integration of Workflow Management Systems with various Knowledge Management Systems. We have synthesized a number of common concepts described in extant literature dealing with the subject. The challenge lays in their further development and an appropriate application. The paper explains some key terms, reviews related work and identifies common aspects. Next, we define outstanding issues within the problem domain and suggest possible solutions. In particular, we operate with flexibility of workflow models, facilitating collaboration, organizational learning, advanced decision making, and process monitoring. Another topic introduces human aspects of BPM. To further illustrate the outlined theses, two illustrative examples have been attached, namely from national health sector and software engineering industry. For BPM in healthcare, tasks are typically facilitated rather than automated. We propose an employment of retroactive workflows together with process mining. Regarding the second example, software development is a highly knowledge-intensive domain. Hence we focus on a stimulation of knowledge sharing and on capturing knowledge using a semantic web.