knowledge management

Knowledge Management has become one of the most recognized management concepts in the last decade. Knowledge is the critical success factor to sustain the competitive ability in companies but changes rapidly in today’s dynamic business environment. Therefore, companies are obliged to foster the knowledge transfer and development. “Community of Practice” is a team-building method to support the efficient use, communication and creation of knowledge in industrial and manufacturing enterprises.

Knowledge as a resource for business value creation became an increased importance during the last years. Industries are mainly influenced, which value creation is basing for the most part on the acquisition, generation and usage of knowledge. Known tools for business process modelling only consider explicit knowledge which is represented in a formal manner. There is no focus on person-related knowledge that is not mainly used for information processing. KMDL allows the modelling and analysis of knowledge intensive business processes like software engineering, mechanical design or technical sales and basing on this the planning of knowledge management systems and their integration into a firm.

The changing market situation due to growing globalisation, the development of new technologies, as well as the strong competition forces today’s enterprises to employ innovative strategies in order to maintain their competitiveness on national and international markets. Many companies respond to this challenges establishing cross national co-operations. This policy is also applied in the field of product development. Nevertheless it becomes clear that many problems of a product development between distant located collaboration partners are based on cultural differences. Hence balancing and adjusting cultural differences is of pivotal impor-tance for the success of the project type.

By the end of 1998 the Volkswagen AG Board of Executives went ahead with plans to test and implement a knowledge management programme called ww.deck (world wide development and exchange of corporate knowledge). Since early 1999 an interdisciplinary team has worked towards the establishment of a capable and sophisticated knowledge management infrastructure for the Volkswagen Group.