Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Design of Personal Knowledge Management Systems

Knowledge Management (KM) tools have become an established part of Enterprise Information Systems in the recent years. While traditional KM initiatives typically address knowledge exchange within project teams, communities of practice, within a whole enterprise, or even within the extended enterprise (customer knowledge management, KM in the supply chain, . . . ), the relatively new area of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) investigates how knowledge workers can enhance their productivity by better encoding, accessing, and reusing their personal knowledge. In this paper, we present a cost-benefit analysis of PKM – where benefit comes from efficiently finding task-specific, useful knowledge items, and costs come from search efforts as well as externalisation and (re-)structuring efforts for the personal knowledge base.