< Paper IC 2000 :

Workshop on Common approaches in knowledge management

EKAW’2000, Juan-les-Pins, 2nd of October 2000 Organization :
This workshop is organized by members of the CoMMA (Corporate Memory Management through Agents) IST project:
  • Fabien GANDON (INRIA, FR)
  • Philippe PEREZ (ATOS, FR)
  • Agostino POGGI (University of Parma, IT)
  • Joel QUINQUETON (LIRMM,FR)
Motivations :
Companies confront a constantly changing business environment, where increasing pressure on time to market, quality and costs are forcing the constant re-evaluation of strategies and competencies. They are faced with a high and increasing complexity given by the number of services, the wide variety of customers dispersed over multiple countries, and the rapidly evolving technologies. Moreover, in the European policy increases the migration flow making people from different cultures work together. The economical context results in many companies merging at international level and therefore culture melting.

This complex and changing environment requires a large number of distributed competencies changing dynamically with market, technologies and offered services. The necessity to have a correct, efficient and effective exploitation of its available Know How is now of vital importance for any enterprise, and this is what Knowledge Management aims at.
Knowledge Management is about developing and deploying user friendly solutions through the organizational structures and activities, enabling to share the knowledge of each employee, promoting innovation, enhancing reactivity and connecting skills in a corporate identity. Companies must envisage multidisciplinary solutions for capturing, modeling, mining and providing knowledge related to the company activities (e.g. products, services, customers, suppliers...), through the whole organization.
Finally, the information sector represents for the companies a very fast increasing source of corporate profits. More than 50% of the fastest-growing companies can be termed knowledge companies in that they sell the knowledge of their employees rather than manufacture a product or deliver a service. However, despite the enormous advances in information sciences and the vast holding of libraries around the world, the knowledge most often called upon in business purposes is that stored in the head of people in the form of memory skills, experience, education, imagination, and creativity. There lies an exciting challenge for Knowledge Management.

European Community Context :
Taking into account this new deal, the European Community (EC) has defined a new strategic goal: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. To achieve this goal, the EC decided to support the development and adoption of new IST (Information Society Technologies) solutions and practices and to promote innovative RTD projects. Moreover, the EC encourages collaboration between selected projects in the same area. This collaboration can lead in some case to cluster projects: clusters are defined as a more intense and voluntary co-operation between projects, where common objectives are defined and tangible results must be achieved. Clusters enable critical mass for technologies, standardization and regulation, to influence political and regulatory bodies, to enhance impact and visibility of the clustered projects.

Objectives of the workshop :
This workshop proposal is motivated by the wishes of several people involved in different IST projects that are fully related to the Knowledge Management, to develop together a common approach in this area. All the interested projects decided to build a cluster and to assign concrete objectives to this collaborative work. The following list of objectives should be considered as time sequential:
- To compare the different technical approaches and to try to merge some part of the solutions,
- To elicit common indicators regarding human factor, technology, business… that will provide visibility about the corporate knowledge implementation within an enterprise,
- To define new common assessment means to evaluate the success of knowledge management projects,
- To find out common support solutions to assure this success,
- To establish common terminology by pointing out relevant concepts and providing them common definition that will be applied and shared by all the related projects.
- To define the first components of a methodology that could be applied to the entire related projects and  that will rely on the definition of common business models.


Program :
  • 9H30-9H45 "Short introduction of  the Workshop"
    Philippe Perez (ATOS)
    Download presentation (in English): Powerpoint

  • 9H45-10H15 "Cluster for Common Approaches in Knowledge management"
    Jeroen Kemp (Fraunhofer IAO)
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  • 10H15-10H45 "Process Modelling for Knowledge management"
    Peter Heisig (Fraunhofer IPK)
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  • 10H45-11H00 Coffee Break
  • 11H00-11H30 "Toward a Common Methodology for Knowledge Management"
    Albert Bokma & Andrew Slade  (University of Sunderland)
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  • 11H30-12H00 "On the use of knowledge modelling techniques for knowledge management: A perspective"
    Josefa Z. Hernández & Ana García-Serrano (Technical University of Madrid)
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  • 12H00-12H50 Discussion
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  • 13H00-14H00 Lunch Break
  • 14H15-14H45 "The CoMMA IST project: example of a methodology"
    Fabien Gandon (INRIA)
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  • 14H45-15H15 "Manageable and meaningful information brokering"
    Joost Breuker & Wouter Jansweijer & Erica van der Stadt & Jan van Lieshout (University of Amsterdam)
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  • 15H15-15H30 Coffee Break
  • 15H30-17H30 Discussion