Supporting the conception of a Knowledge Management System by the PIFA approach: case study STMicroelectronics

Workflow and Knowledge Management became more and more important in the recent years. Neverless, both of the domains have still problems to resolve: Knowledge Management has to handle the problems of human resistance to capitalize knowledge. Workflow Management has to deal with changes in the process model and in process instances. Especially, in a knowledge intensive dynamic process environment, it is primordial to understand and to satisfy these two requirements to guarantee the user acceptance. In this article, we characterize and present PIFA - an analyze method to capture the requirements of both domains. We will also illustrate how PIFA can help to design a knowledge management system based on the analysis results to support workflow and information management. Our PIFA-approach is especially applicable on knowledge intensive dynamic processes. Therefore, the process level helps capturing requirements for the process now, the information level helps capturing the information now to improve the information sharing within a process and between processes and the functionality level guarantees that the involved actor have an immediate surplus value and will accept the changes caused to the defined process flow and the higher information capitalization. Therefore, PIFA combines the process' actions with the knowledge capitalization and the surplus value.