Workflow-centric distribution of organizational knowledge: the case of document flow coordination

Workflow-centric knowledge distribution mechanisms have been proposed recently by a number of researchers to coordinate the flow of codified knowledge in large organizations. This has led to a new research area referred to as "process-driven knowledge distribution". We apply the concepts and techniques in this area to the case of document flow coordination. We first propose a notion of document world and then develop a document distribution methodology. In particular, we create a new graphical model called Organizational Knowledge Networks (OK-Nets) that consists of work-nets and awareness nets. An analytical method, Knowledge Association Algebra (KA-Algebra) is also developed for initializing and maintaining the OK-Nets. Finally, we delineate our prototyping efforts based on the methodology propose in the paper.