Knowledge Management and Organizational Memories

The task of knowledge management (KM) is to capture explicit and tacit knowledge of an organization in order to facilitate the access, sharing, and reuse of that information. This must be guided by a strategic vision to fulfill its primary organizational objectives: improving knowledge sharing and co-operative work inside the organization; disseminating best practices; improving relationships with the external world; preserving past knowledge of the company for reuse; improving the quality of projects and innovations; anticipating the evolution of the external environment; and preparing for unexpected events and managing urgency and crisis situations. One approach for KM is to build a corporate memory or organizational memory (OM), for which several techniques can be adopted. The choice of a solution depends on the type of organization, its needs and its culture, and must take into account the organization's people and technology. This text presents models, methods, and techniques for building, managing and using corporate memories. These models incorporate knowledge bases, ontologies, documents, FAQs, workflow systems, case-based reasoning systems, multi-agent systems, and CSCW.The book is divided into five parts: methods; knowledge-based approaches; ontologies and documents; case-based reasoning approaches; and distributed and collaborative approaches.