Harmonising codification and socialisation in knowledge management

Abstract

Decision makers process and combine manifold types of data, information and knowledge, available in various forms in the organisation. The aim of knowledge management (KM) is to provide timely and contextual knowledge to decision makers. A comprehensive KM initiative should leverage the wealth of explicit and tacit knowledge residing in an organisation. In this paper, we advance an ontology-based knowledge handling method and tool that aim at harmonising the codification and socialisation approaches to KM. We present the software system that has been developed and then explain how it can be applied in a methodology-driven manner. This is illustrated using the real-world example of a KM initiative in a management consulting company.

Keywords:

• knowledge stocks and flows
• knowledge management tools
• decision support

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dimitris Apostolou

About the authors

Dimitris Apostolou is a Lecturer in the Informatics Department of the University of Piraeus. His research focuses on group support systems, knowledge-based decision support systems and knowledge management. He holds a Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece and an M.Sc. in Information Technology from University College London, England.

Andreas Abecker

Andreas Abecker heads the ‘Knowledge Management’ team at Karlsruhe (Germany) University's technology transfer centre for ICT. His research interests include ontology-based systems, business-process-oriented knowledge management and semantic technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe.

Gregoris Mentzas

Gregoris Mentzas is a Professor of Information Management at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece and Director of the Information Management Unit (IMU) at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece.