Knowledge Process Modeling

In order to show that the relational model describes knowledge sharing inside Intenzz, we need to identify the knowledge sharing scenarios inside the organization. The approach taken was to model all business processes which the survey results covered – after the cleansing completed in the management interviews. The challenge was, however, to derive knowledge processes from the business processes. As Strohmaier (2005) states, ―Although today‘s organizational knowledge management initiatives already focus on multiple business processes rather than on a single business process, surprisingly neither existing process standards nor existing business process modeling techniques nor knowledge management approaches provide comprehensive concepts on how to tackle the identified challenge.‖

Indeed, very commonly the focus in the modeling of business processes is on the modeling the ―flow of work‖ rather than the ―flow of knowledge‖ in organizations, which is the main

goal in the modeling of the knowledge processes (Strohmaier 2003). Of course most processes in a knowledge-intensive organization, such as Intenzz, are knowledge-oriented, but still, there is a difference between knowledge-oriented business processes and actual knowledge processes. (Probst & Raub & Romhardt 1999) Remus and Lehner (2000) calls knowledge-oriented business processes knowledge-intensive operative business processes and states that ―they use knowledge in order to create the process output as well as for handling the process itself‖. (Remus & Lehner 2000, p. 1.) On the other hand, knowledge processes ―support the flow of knowledge between business units and processes as well as the creation and collection of knowledge. This can be processes supporting the collection, processing and storing of information as an outcome of conventional business processes.‖

(Remus & Lehner 2000, p. 1.) In practice it means that in the knowledge processes each step has to be possible to map to knowledge generation, storing, transfer or application (as defined in chapter 2.1.3 about knowledge management processes). Process steps of business processes, on the other hand, can be of any content, there is no requirement that they have to be possible to map to the above mentioned four KM processes. An example is the first step in BP3: ―offer knowledge session‖. In knowledge-intensive organizations some business and knowledge processes can be close to each other, nevertheless the explicit modeling of the knowledge processes has multiple benefits, as explained in the following paragraphs.

Categorization of the knowledge process steps was realized based on ideas from Strohmaier‘s (2005) B-KIDE framework. This framework has been developed to design knowledge infrastructure based on knowledge processes. Consequently, the framework could not be used completely, because the goal of this research was to analyze knowledge sharing and not to define the knowledge infrastructure based on the knowledge processes.

Nevertheless, the idea of mapping business processes to knowledge processes has been adopted. The relationship of business processes and knowledge processes is illustrated in Figure 11 and a deeper view is provided in Figure 13. Among other, it describes how knowledge is generated in business processes and can be stored, transferred and applied to enhance the performance of business processes.

Figure 11: Business and knowledge processes (Source: Strohmaier 2003, p. 6.)

The cornerstone of the B-KIDE framework is the B-KIDE tool (see Figure 12) developed by Strohmaier (2005). Even though this tool is not used in this project, the construction principles of the software are very relevant.

Figure 12: Scope of the B-Kide Tool (Source: Strohmaier 2005, p. 100.)

The B-KIDE framework maps complete business processes to the four knowledge processes: knowledge generation, knowledge storing, knowledge transfer and knowledge application. (Figure 13)

Figure 13: Modeling Knowledge Work of Business Processes (Source: Strohmaier 2005, p. 68.)

Since this research is interested in knowledge sharing inside Intenzz and not within the organization of the customers of Intenzz, there is no benefit in analyzing the complete business processes which contain process steps taken by customers or other business partners. Therefore this research only categorizes the process steps taken by Intenzz employees into the four knowledge processes. The following table structure (Table 6) is used:

Table 6: Structure for mapping knowledge sharing steps (Source: own analysis) Business

Processes

Knowledge Generation

Knowledge Storing

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge Application BP<ID> Step<ID> Step<ID> Step<ID> Step<ID>

The columns are the four knowledge processes, the rows are the business processes and the cells contain the process steps which are applicable.

The benefit of making knowledge processes explicit means that they can be managed more efficiently and at a lower cost and the captured knowledge is of higher quality. (Kalpic and Bernus 2006) Remus and Lehner (2000) as well as Palkovits and Woitsch and Karagiannis (2003) mention more benefits: 1) knowledge is linked to the business processes; therefore information can be provided in a more targeted way, e.g. minimizing information overflow. 2) knowledge (and knowledge needs) can be interpreted better because they are in the context of business processes. 3) all the process improvement methodologies can now be used for the knowledge processes as well 4) explicit knowledge process models support cost planning and organizational role assignments 5) knowledge management systems can be better designed to support explicit processes.

In recent years increasing research (e. g., Heisig 2001, Jablonski & Horn & Schlundt 2001, Abecker et al. 2002, Remus 2002, Choi & Jung & Song 2004) has been performed in the domain of business process oriented knowledge management (bpoKM). For the purpose of modeling many custom-developed methodologies and tools have been developed such as PROMOTE (Woitsch & Karagiannis 2003), K-Modeler (Gronau et al. 2003), WORKWARE (Jørgensen 2004), KBPI (Dalmaris 2006), KnowMore (Abecker et al.

2000), etc. Absent standards or even widely used practices in bpoKM, the author decided to apply a BPM standard, BPMN 1.0. (OMG 2006)

BPMN is a proved technique to model business processes. BPMN provides a notation, a business process diagram in a flow-chart format that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, the promise of BPMN is to offer a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation. In order to keep using standards as much as possible in this PhD project, even the knowledge processes were modeled in BPMN. There are three basic types of models within BPMN: private (internal) business processes, abstract (public) processes, and collaboration (global) processes. A collaboration process depicts the interactions between two or more business entities. The

collaboration process can be shown as two or more abstract processes communicating with each other through so-called touch-points, which are the connection among the abstract processes. In this project collaboration processes are used, as shown in Appendix 6.

In BPM projects tool selection is always difficult, because different tools have different strengths and weaknesses and only few of them support translation to BPEL, which is critical for ―executable BPMs‖, i.e., business models which can be turned into processes running in an enterprise computer system. Since executing the models was outside the scope of this research, a very user-friendly and very widely available tool was chosen:

Microsoft Visio 2003. Since the out-of-box MS Visio does not support the BPMN 1.0 standard, it does not have all the shapes necessary to draw BPMN-based models. Version 1.1 of the ―Frapu-BPMN_Template.vss‖ stencil had to be imported into Visio. This stencil adds the BPMN notations to the Shapes list in Visio. It is freely available at http://workflow-research.de/Downloads/BPMN/ from Workflow Research (2003).

―Workflow Research is maintained by Michael zur Muehlen as a repository of papers, presentations, and links on the topics of process orientation, management of process organizations, and workflow automation in general.‖ (Workflow Research 2003)