Developing Foundations for Knowledge Management Systems

Knowledge Management (KM) is an important issue in organizations. However there are several barriers to successful KM. In particular, knowledge hoarding, difficulties in identifying organizational knowledge, not understanding KM requirements, and technical difficulties of knowledge representation. In this work we focus on a connection between the managerial and technical aspects of knowledge management. We study the nature of organizational knowledge in order to derive knowledge management requirements to support the design of computerized Knowledge Management Systems. The work consists of three parts: 1) Defining organizational knowledge that needs to be managed. 2) Using the definition of organizational knowledge and its attributes to identify knowledge management requirements. This involves identifying the various facets of knowledge as well as the perceived meta-knowledge requirements of users. 3) Deriving guidelines for the efficient design of knowledge management systems.