Enterprise Knowlegde Management for Emergent Organizations: An Ontology-Driven Approach

Abstract

Lately, some Knowledge Management (KM) solutions suggest strategies to identify and acquire the invaluable organizational knowledge. These statements seem especially true in the case of emergent organizational forms for which the beginning of the new century has brought about a paradigm change in which capital and work are no longer the only fundamental bases for successful management. Although this has caught the attention of both the industrialists and researchers, an important gap exists between these two domains, mainly, due to the lack of understanding of the KM concept and the activities that it implies by organizational managers. Several KM models have appeared in the research field, but none of them includes all the necessary aspects for an effective KM. This chapter presents a Distributed Knowledge Management Conceptual Model that encompasses the key factors for KM in emergent organizations and proposes the means to implement them. Moreover, to address heterogeneity, documentation overload and lack of context we propose Onto-DOM, a question-answering ontology-based strategy within a Distributed Organizational Memory.