Training

Software supporting knowledge management and knowledge intensive business processes is mainly planned and deployed for stationary use. The average time needed to process information can effectively be reduced by adding a mobile channel to existing knowledge management software, e.g. when negotiating with business partners or maintaining individual technical installations. In this paper the authors describe K_MOBILE, a concept enabling access to knowledge management services through the mobile channel in a situation aware manner. Access to information systems can be truly adopted to mobile use, with help of a user specific context built by combining available information with respect to time and location. This is a benefit especially when carrying out intensive tasks in sale, consulting, technical services, because it is difficult to estimate the actual need for information and hence the costs of access to this information is potentially very high.

Knowledge transfer is critical for the success of R&D projects in terms of supply, usage and multiplication of knowledge within and between projects. However, possibilities to opti-mise knowledge transfer do hardly exist since the application of structured methods appears to be hard to realise because of criteria specific for R&D projects like creativity, incertitude and little structuring. In the following, a concept is introduced that establishes transparency according to knowledge transfer in R&D projects and creates a basis to use potentials for optimising knowledge transfer by specific application of knowledge management methods.

The company-spanning collaboration offers companies the chance to exhaust new market potentials by in- creasing their innovation capability and productivity. An important prerequisite therefore is to optimally support knowledge networks and especially the corresponding knowledge exchange and problem solving processes. In the context of the project TRUST an approach was developed to enable companies and respectively their employees on the one hand to provide knowledge needed for problem solving. On the other hand the employees have access within an integrated working environment to experiences, know-how and competences of the knowledge network to solve their specific problems and to develop their individual domain competence.

The adoption of knowledge within an enterprise to its strategic aims is a requisite for realising these aims. But the necessary knowledge for it can’t be provided in a large amount from outside of an enterprise. So, the knowledge within an enterprise has to be enhanced by certain means of on-the-job training. This article shows some opportunities for e-learning in education and their relevance for on-the-job training. It is based on the experiences in using elearning in courses at the Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Production Management.

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.

Communities of Practice are an important instrument of knowledge management, as they allow transferring expertise to remote business problems. Focussing on community facilitation and IT, this article assembles necessary requirements for community software and proposes a better support of social processes of knowledge work.

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.

Management literature reports on the trend for large companies to adopt the principles of the “learning organisation” or “lifelong learning”. They found “corporate universities” for educating their own staff, which are commonly based on computer-based or web-based educational services. The virtual institute VIMIMS offers an approach that is de-signed to offer small and medium enterprises access to up-to-date knowledge on production management without their having to invest substantial sums in internal further education programmes.