Experience management: lessons learned from knowledge engineering

Abstract

Experiental knowledge has been recognized as a critical success factor since the beginning of Knowledge-Management, but practical work in the KM-field has shown that dealing with experimential knowledge is still not easy. Since the 80ies Knowledge Engineering has been faced with the same kind of challange and can contribute by teaching us some important lessons, that we propose should be used as a foundation or kernel in conceiving Experience Management solutions and systems. Among these lessons, the fundamental one is, that in order to improve experience sharing we first should understand experiential knowledge is a way that promotes the appreciation of human factors. This can be reached by understanding the following five aspects of experiential knowledge from a constructivist point of view: the Function, the Mechanism, the 2 States, the Organisation and the Handling of Experiential Knowledge. Based on the proposed understanding, five consequences are deduced that we suggest should serve as leading principles for conceiving and using Experience Management solutions and systems.