Knowledge Networking: Integrating the Product and Process Views
Knowledge management researchers and consultants, as well as companies that are implementing
or have already implemented knowledge management initiatives typically follow one of two high
level views:
- the knowledge as a product (which is also called "knowledge stock") view; or
- the knowledge as a process (which is also called "knowledge flow") view.
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Managing knowledge as a product
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The product-centred view focuses on knowledge assets, their creation, storage, and reuse.
In this perspective "Knowledge=Objects" that can be identified and handled in information systems.
Researchers in this field are mainly computer scientists and psychologists who have been
working in Artificial Intelligence and developing corporate memories, which in analogy
to human memory allow companies to build on previous experiences and avoid the repetition
of errors.
Information technology support within this view deals with explicit knowledge and is
often based on document management systems. Lessons-learned archives, best-practice
databases, distributed case-bases that capture problem-solving expertise, are examples
of the tools developed and used within this approach.
Given the fact that knowledge is often communicated through text documents the product
view is emphasising the content dimension of knowledge management. The goal of
tools and techniques in this area is to precisely retrieve documents, or document parts,
appropriate for satisfying the information needs specified by a user query or a static
information filter. Retrieval can be done either from an existing document repository
which might be indexed in a meaningful manner extracting as much as possible content
to be put into powerful index structures, or from external sources like Internet
information brokers, commercial databases, or web sites.
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Managing knowledge as a process
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The process-centred view mainly understands knowledge management as a social communication
process. In this perspective "Knowledge =Process", i.e. a complex set of dynamic behavioural
actions that are constantly changing.
Researchers traditionally involved in this field are mainly sociologists or
organisational theorists and computer scientists involved in the development and
enhancement of groupware and CSCW tools.
Information technology support within this view includes groupware and
collaboration tools. Innovative techniques for communication and cooperation such as
e-mail, real-time chats, video-conferencing, shared document editing, workflow and
project management tools, etc. are used to facilitate and improve knowledge sharing
and creating collaboration processes.
Compared to the product view, which aims at exploiting the content dimension, the
process view emphasises the context dimension of knowledge. The process view
concentrates on questions like: which environment must exist in order to get knowledge
content created and shared, which communication paths must be established in order to
enable creation of shared knowledge, and which communication structure must be provided
(e.g. which discussion threads) in order to ease externalisation and gathering of knowledge.
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Know-Net uses knowledge objects as the common unifier to integrate both KM approaches
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Know-Net's approach integrates both aforementioned approaches by providing both:
- the appropriate context (i.e. which databases, discussion threads, organizational
and work processes as well as cultural changes must be established) as well as
- sophisticated indexing, retrieval, and active delivery mechanisms which exploit knowledge
content plus formalized context information (e.g. in the form of document meta data
describing document history, discussion context, etc).
In designing the conceptual, methodological and technical architecture of Know-Net for fusing
both the content centric KM approach with the process centric KM approach, we examined the
common characteristics and properties that Knowledge Objects contained in both approaches.
