Reconciling Knowledge Management and Workflow Management Systems: The Activity-Based Knowledge Management Approach

Schahram Dustdar (Distributed Systems Group, Institute of Information Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Austria)

Abstract: Current trends in collaborative knowledge management emphasize the importance of inter- and intra-organizational business process support. Enactment of business processes has primarily been a domain of workflow management systems. In this paper we propose a hybrid architecture for reconciliation of knowledge management and workflow management systems in order to support process participants in organizations, who are increasingly distributed and need to share and distribute knowledge artifacts. Today one pressing challenge is to utilize software as to create, share, and exchange (knowledge) work in collaborative knowledge activities across locations, while still being business process aware. This paper develops a conceptual framework, discusses a software architecture, and presents examples of a software system implementation for activity-based knowledge management for global project teams.

Keywords: knowledge management, workflow

Categories: H.4