Experience-Based Knowledge Management:

How To Capitalize on Failures and Missed Opportunities

Matthias Jarke

Informatik V, RWTH Aachen

Ahornstr. 55, 52074 Aachen, Germany

jarke@informatik.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract

This talk questions a number of apparently common assumptions in knowledge management and data mining. Taking up early suggestions by [AS78] that organizations (like individuals) only learn from their mistakes, I shall stress the need for an evolutionary approach that involves the continuous analysis of experience captured in some kind of traces [Poh96, Jar98], focusing on failures of existing knowledge (type I errors) and for missed opportunities due to non-explicit knowledge (type II errors).

Using examples from recent practice, I shall review a number of computer supported techniques how this can be accomplished, including

- conflict-driven cooperative modeling, to detect communication failures and process improvement opportunities in engineering processes [JJPP97, JK98]

- setting up long-term feedback loops between engineering production, and service to continuously capture, structure and disseminate improvement information [KJ98]

- data mining based on the concept of counterfactuals,
  to detect missed opportunity patterns [Dha98].

In particular, problems of scalability, competitive settings, and multiple viewpoints in the handling of complex knowledge structures will be addressed.

References

[AS78] C. Argyris, D. Schön. Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Addison-Wesley 1978.

[Dha98] V. Dhar. Data mining in finance: using counterfactuals to generate knowledge from organizational information systems. To appear, Information Systems 23, 7 (1998).

[Jar98] M. Jarke, ed. Requirements tracing. Special Issue of Communications of the ACM, December 1998.

[JK98] M. Jarke, S. Kethers. Erfahrungen bei der Initiierung eines regionalen Kooperationsnetzwerks: Problemanalyse und Modellierungstechniken. To appear, Wirtschaftsinformatik.

[JJPP97] M. Jarke, M.A. Jeusfeld, P. Peters, K. Pohl. Coordinating distributed organizational knowledge. Data & Knowledge Engineering 23, 3 (1997), 247-268.

[KJ98] R. Klamma, M. Jarke. Driving the organizational learning cycle: the case of computer-aided failure management. Proc. ECIS 98: 4th European Conference on Information Systems, Aix-en-Provence 1998.

[Poh96] Pohl, K. Process-Centred Requirements Engineering. John Wiley RSP, 1996.

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Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM98)
Basel, Switzerland, 29-30 Oct. 1998,

(U. Reimer, ed.)

http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-13/