The E-Decisional Community: An Integrated Knowledge Sharing Platform

Knowledge Management (KM) has become a key success factor in diverse fields, given the importance of knowledge as a significant organizational asset. In order to solve problems and support complex decision-making processes, knowledge and experience have to be transmitted across individuals, business units and organizations. Thus, Knowledge Sharing (KS) can be considered as the basic element of any knowledge-oriented process: KS fosters collaboration in complex environments, and facilitates experiential knowledge discovery, distribution and use. This paper presents a proposal for the development of a Community of Practice (CoP) called the E-Decisional Community. This community uses a domain-independent knowledge representation called Set of Experience Knowledge Structure (SOEKS), and captures the decisional fingerprint inside organizations using Decisional DNA. It is based on principles from different technologies namely Software Agents, Grid and Cloud computing, in order to provide an autonomous, intelligent and coordinated large-scale KS environment. The E-Decisional Community biggest concern is to promote experiential knowledge evolution and sharing through generations of decisionmakers, aiming at the creation of a marketplace where knowledge is provided as a service.