Project Hypermedia and Pattern Based Knowledge Management for Smart Organisations (HYPERKNOWLEDGE)

Start: 7/1/2001
End: 12/31/2002

Information-age organisations need to utilise knowledge about their business and organisational practices as well as knowledge of the environment. Verbundplan, the consulting daughter of a major European energy supplier (Verbund, Austria) needs improvement of leveraging incompletely specified corporate knowledge and in-house expertise in the strong competition of the deregulated energy market. The City of Riga, Latvia, needs it for improving management processes. With a focus on “smart” organisations, we propose two applications of novel technology and approach to knowledge management, based on participatory business modelling. This technology is an integration of the EKP (Enterprise Knowledge Patterns) method developed at KTH, Sweden, and the hypermedia- based RETH tool developed at Siemens Austria.

Once the business knowledge is represented in RETH, it is easy to use through the intranets, supporting process distribution and optimisation. Objectives: This project aims to achieve 2 objectives. The user organisations want to improve their work practices through participatory business modelling as well as exploiting knowledge in support of organisational activities, in the spirit of “smart” organisations. The providers want to customise and validate the yet untested integration of their novel technologies in these real-world environments prior to commercialisation. Verbundplan needs to leverage incomplete specified corporate knowledge in the strong competition of the deregulated energy market. The City of Riga, Latvia, needs it for improving its management processes. By achieving those objectives in this project, primarily the EC objective of efficiency improvements is supported. Work description: The novel technology to be used for achieving these objectives is an integration of the EKP (Enterprise Knowledge Patterns) methodology developed at KTH, Sweden, and the hypermedia-based RETH tool developed at Siemens Austria. EKP is an approach to participatory business modelling by reusing business knowledge in the form of specific patterns. The RETH tool supports modelling and representing this kind of knowledge actively and allows to “publish” the knowledge easily through Web technology in the respective intranets. Overall, the integration of EKP and RETH allows knowledge management to be based on business patterns as well as the exchange and distribution of corporate knowledge through the intranets. After a training phase, we propose to apply this novel technology by letting both people from user and provider organisations work with the RETH tool, where the latter serve primarily as consultants. Already available patterns from previous EKP applications will be represented in RETH and adapted to the respective user organisations. The tool may already be applicable for supporting the knowledge acquisition in meetings, although this has yet to be tested in a participatory setting. In any case, RETH will serve as an active documentation facility, where all the knowledge will be represented in the form of hypermedia (hypertext and multimedia). RETH can export such documents to Web representations fully automatically. After this application phase, an evaluation phase is planned in order to elaborate on the lessons learned. The user organisations will figure out the utility of this approach with respect to their given objectives. For the providers, the diversity of these user organisations is important to determine the right market segments for the planned commercialisation of their novel integrated technology. Based on the customisation effort in these applications, they will know better for future customisations in the open marketplace. Milestones: The duration of the project is 18 months. It includes six work packages and one management package. Four milestones have been identified: M1: approach ready for deployment, M2: training completed, M3: trial application completed, M4: project completed. The following deliverables have been defined: user requirements statement, training material, report from the trial applications, knowledge repositories in electronic form, evaluation report, and report on dissemination.