Abstract A complete form of knowledge management system comprises both process management and contents management. Process management is concerned with handling activities to generate and utilize knowledge, whereas contents management deals with knowledge contents themselves. Workflow, considered as a core component of process management, is to define and administer business processes automatically. A knowledge map is a representation tool to visualize knowledge sources and relationships among knowledge artifacts. Noting the crucial needs to integrate process management and contents management and recognizing that previous research has paid little attention to this issue, we propose a framework for developing a workflow-based knowledge map. The proposed process-perspective knowledge map takes the structure of processes and tasks defined in workflow into account. We then materialize the framework by developing a prototype and applying it to the car seat design process of the automobile industry. The integration represents an exploratory effort to combine process management and contents management.
1. Introduction
Although theoretical underpinning is yet fragile, knowledge management (KM) has attracted increasing attention from academicians and practitioners alike (Harvard Business School, 1998; Kakabadse et al., 2001). The spectrum of KM is so ample, encompassing both organizational aspects and technical factors. Among others, however, knowledge management systems (KMS) serves as an indispensable tool for KM in that it facilitates knowledge generation, dissemination, and utilization (Liebowitz, 1999).
Broadly, KMS is composed of a process management module to administer knowledge activities to generate and utilize knowledge and a contents management module which deals with knowledge contents, input and output of knowledge activities. Furthermore, on the one hand, workflow is considered as a core component of process management since it defines and administers business processes automatically. On the other hand, the knowledge map accounts for the cornerstone of contents management, since it functions as the representation tool to visualize knowledge sources and identify relationships among knowledge artifacts.
Thus far, a paucity of studies has dealt with the knowledge map. Although the utility has long been recognized, research output of the knowledge map has largely remained conceptual and metaphysical. In particular, there has been no attempt to integrate workflow and the knowledge map or, in other words, to propose a workflow-based knowledge map. Voluminous research on workflow has been carried out independently of the knowledge map and past research on the knowledge map has been conducted separately from workflow. However, the majority of knowledge that needs to be managed is generated and utilized in-house, along the workflow of organization. Therefore, it is meaningful and useful to build the process-perspective knowledge map based on the structure of processes and tasks defined in the workflow. To this end, we will propose a framework for designing a knowledge map that takes the workflow-related factors into account, which is called a workflow-based knowledge map. In the framework, the set of necessary artifacts of knowledge can be collected and structured into a knowledge map based on the relationships among knowledge users, tasks, and knowledge described in the workflow. We will also present a prototype of a Web-based knowledge map designed and implemented in accordance with the proposed framework. In doing that, the car seat design process of the automobile industry is employed to demonstrate the detailed procedure.