How experience management can benefit from relationships among different types of knowledge

Abstract

In a learning organization, knowledge and experience is created and used at different levels of granularity and maturity. However, these different knowledge/experience types usually coexist without any links and relationships. The field of situated cognition shows that such relationships are typical and important in the human learning "procedure" (e.g., in expert-novice learning/teaching). We propose that experience management systems can benefit from the support of such relationships. The development of such systems includes -in addition- the definition of an appropriate knowledge life-cycle model describing the mentioned relationships (here by the example of best practices and lessons learned), embedding this in business processes, an operative definition of maturity/validity, and respective knowledge representation issues. Such a development results in a concept that can be implemented with commercially available case-based reasoning tools. We illustrate the approach with real-life examples from systems that already exist or are being developed.