Models in knowledge management

Abstract

Knowledge Management (KM) consists of a set of concepts, techniques and tools for creating, representing, distributing and evolving knowledge within an organizational context. This knowledge may be about the domain (e.g., cars and the car market for an auto maker), the organization itself (e.g., its current state, objectives, plans, finances), but also about insights and experiences of its members. This knowledge may be explicit in documents or other artifacts, implicit in members of the organization, or embedded in organisational processes or practices. KM is an established discipline since the early '90s [Nonaka94] and is taught in the fields of business administration, information systems, management, and library and information sciences. Models are used in KM to create useful abstractions that can be disseminated, analyzed and managed. We review the history of such models in Information Systems and Computer Science. We then present on-going work that proposes new concepts for capturing strategic knowledge within an organization. These concepts are used through an extension of UML class diagrams to build models that represent organizational vision, objectives, strategies and tactics. This work is inspired by the Business Motivation Model ([BMM]), an OMG standard intended to capture governance knowledge. The presentation is based on on-going research with Daniel Amyot (University of Ottawa), Daniele Barone and Lei Jiang (University of Toronto). © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.