New ideas for knowledge management in product development projects

Abstract

Due to their high complexity, product development processes should be expected to be a highly rewarding field for the application of knowledge management systems. Nonetheless, such systems are rarely used in practice. One important reason is that the extra effort of writing down knowledge is widely perceived as slowing down the actual design work without offering visible benefits. Also, writing documents is typically not a favourite pastime of technicians and engineers. There is a high inhibition threshold due to the expectation that the text within a document is well structured and formulated. Furthermore, documents as knowledge carriers require additional effort to retrieve the knowledge: Often the user has to screen several complete documents to find the piece of information he/she is looking for. Full text searches can help, but quite frequently lead to irrelevant information or miss out an important passages because different words were used. So, economically speaking, knowledge management does not yield sufficient return on investment. The authors claim that this can be changed when

• knowledge capturing is not a separate activity, but is integrated in the daily design work, • knowledge is integrated into a comprehensive representation of the design and the ongoing design process, • knowledge capturing can be done with very low effort, • knowledge retrieval is very efficient, i.e. the user finds relevant information quickly and reliably, • the captured knowledge can be automatically processed in order to extract different views and to create reports for different purposes.

It will be shown that a system that handles a large number of small notes is able to fulfil these requirements. Writing a small note on an adhesive paper is surely the easiest and most popular way of putting down knowledge. The rising popularity of Blogs and Wiki systems for documentation purposes, even in business, shows that people are willing to put down and to share knowledge if they can do it in small portions.