Managing Procedural Knowledge

Procedural knowledge is one of the most valuable assets of individuals as well as academic institutions and commercial companies. The ability to satisfy an order relies on the knowledge how similar tasks have been performed in the past. Thus the preservation of this knowledge is critical. Procedural knowledge takes many different forms, which makes it very hard to reason about it. We propose a method to reduce it to its very essence. This method is very simple, and as such it is not new. But we argue that it is worthwhile to take a fresh look on an existing technology from a new point of view, because it may solve the problem of knowledge preservation that has become apparent in this form only recently. Although the technique is known for a long time, it appears that its potential for the management of procedural knowledge has not been realized so far. It is a also very elegant method since we can show that it serves both as a theoretical device to better understand the nature of processes, but it can also be directly operationalized to derive a new generation of user-friendly tools that support the preservation of procedural knowledge.