About

Within KMi, the team built on existing technologies that supported web-based collaboration, agents, and knowledge modelling to develop tools and methodologies for integrating working and learning within knowledge-intensive organisations. Their approach aimed at several objectives, including supporting individuals and groups to continually reflect on and improve their work practices, facilitating distributed groups to share best practices and enhance their coordination efforts, and promoting the establishment of “virtual centres of excellence” by connecting people with relevant expertise across time and geography. These centres served to identify core competencies and nurture their further development.

These objectives were realised by viewing organisational learning as a process in which knowledge created during work was incrementally captured, structured, and maintained. This knowledge could then be accessed or delivered when needed to inform individual and group work tasks. The approach integrated the full spectrum of learning needs—individual, group, and organisational—and was informed by the extensive experience of The Open University in distance education and open learning.

In the ENRICH project, the team helped organisations realise these objectives by providing tools and methodologies that facilitated the cost-effective construction and sustained use of knowledge-enriched intranets. Specifically, their tools and methodologies were trialed by industrial partners in three pilots within ENRICH. The Team Workbook fostered best practices through the intertwined teaching and use of planning methodologies, such as Total Quality Management at British Aerospace. The Experience Archive assisted the sales force and engineers in sharing expertise through enriched product documentation archives at TecInno. Lastly, the ProGroup Electronic Manual supported wide-area organisational learning using a proactive electronic group manual to integrate multiple group memories at the German National AI Institute.

Team

Zdenek Zdrahal
John Domingue
Paul Mulholland
Marek Hatala