A collaborative knowledge production model for knowledge management in complex engineering domains

Knowledge management (KM) has recently been considered as an important strategy for an enterprise to maintain competence in the fierce market competition. Yet the tools of building lifecycle knowledge management systems are not mature. In this paper we study the issues of how to collect and evaluate knowledge in a collaborative team of a complex engineering domain. We provide a collaborative knowledge production model for it by combining case based knowledge management and workflow management techniques. In this model, we regard knowledge as specific type of product that is made up of several components, which are usually produced by different employees or branches in an enterprise. Each knowledge item has several kinds of statuses to mark its stage in the production process. Each knowledge process changes the status of knowledge items that are being produced. To facilitate reconfiguration, the system is divided into several modules that can be defined separately by users with the minimal influence to other modules.