Knowledge Management Tools

Abstract More and more companies use knowledge management to leverage theis most important resource : knowledge. Knowledge management tries to provide the means to capture, distribute and reuse knowledge both for explicit and tacit knowledge

Introduction Efficient knowledge management is not only a competitive advantage but a vital activity for high- tech companies. Two kinds of knowledge must be preserved and managed : –Explicit knowledge –Tacit knowledge

Explicit & Tacit knowledge Explicit knowledge is knowledge that is already available in the form of technical reports, meeting protocols, products specifications, etc. Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that employees have in their brains in form of individual experience, design rationales, best practices and lessons learned. Because of increasing specialization, increasing product complexity, fierce competition and a constant brain-drain of experts, knowledge management is regarded as the driving force for successful operations in the future.

What is a knowledge tool? Knowledge management tools are technologies, broadly defined, which enhance and enable knowledge generation, codification, and transfer. As with any tools, they are designed to ease the burden of work, through augmentation and automation, allowing resources to be applied efficiently to the tasks for witch they are most suited.

Typology of Knowledge Tools Knowledge Generation –Acquisition –Synthesis –Creation

Typology of Knowledge Tools Knowledge Codification –Typology of knowledge Process Knowledge Factual Knowledge Catalog Knowledge Cultural Knowledge –Representation of knowledge Knowledge-Bases Knowledge Maps Organizational Thesaurus and Dictionary Simulators

Typology of Knowledge Tools Knowledge Transfer –Temporal Distance –Physical Distance –Social Distance

Aspects of Engineering Knowledge Management The term knowledge management describes a huge set of methods and tools reaching from information technology to social sciences. Engineering knowledge management is focused on the product creation process and the interface between engineering and manufacturing.

Aspects of Engineering Knowledge Management Skill Management Capturing and distributing tacit knowledge like lessons learned and best practices Managing explicit knowledge like reports, documents, protocols Capturing and reusing design rationales Knowledge based engineering methods and application.

Aspects of Engineering Knowledge Management Skill management deals with the maintenance and documentation of employees’ skills. Clearly, it is necessary to predict skills needed for the future and to take measures to get these. Yellow pages which contain the names and competency profiles of company experts help to get into contact and increase networking capabilities of new employees.

Aspects of Engineering Knowledge Management Best practices describe optimal solutions for typical engineering problems. Lessons learned are experiences gained and errors made during a project whose application in other projects can greatly improve their performance.

Aspects of Engineering Knowledge Management Design rationales capture the knowledge of design decisions made in the product creation phase.Modeling and reusing design rationales is a huge challenge for knowledge intensive companies because very few documents generated during product creation reveal the complex reasoning involved.

Aspects of Engineering Knowledge Management Knowledge based engineering is a highly dynamic area of research. It deals with automatic knowledge processing that helps to support the engineer in repetitive tasks.Before a knowledge based engineering application can be deployed you have to collect the knowledge from the experts and find an appropriate representation for machine interface.