Active Knowledge Modeling of Enterprises

verfasst von: Frank Lillehagen, John Krogstie

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

Enterprise Modeling has been defined as the art of externalizing enterprise knowledge, i.e., representing the core knowledge of the enterprise. Although useful in product design and systems development, for modeling and model-based approaches to have a more profound effect, a shift in modeling approaches and methodologies is necessary. Modeling should become as natural as drawing, sketching and scribbling, and should provide powerful services for capturing work-centric, work-supporting and generative knowledge, for preserving context and ensuring reuse. A solution is the application of Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM).

The AKM technology is about discovering, externalizing, expressing, representing, sharing, exploring, configuring, activating, growing and managing enterprise knowledge. An AKM solution is about exploiting the Web as a knowledge engineering medium, and developing knowledge-model-based families of platforms, model-configured workplaces and services.

This book was written by the inventors of AKM arising out of their cooperation with both scientists and industrial practitioners over a long period of time, and the authors give examples, directions, methods and services to enable new ways of working, exploiting the AKM approach to enable effective c-business, enterprise design and development, and lifecycle management. Industry managers and design engineers will become aware of the manifold possibilities of, and added values in, IT-supported distributed design processes, and researchers for collaborative design environments will find lots of stimulation and many examples for future developments.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. What is Active Knowledge Modeling Technology?

Many scientists argue that the main reason why humans have excelled as species is our ability to represent, reuse, and transfer knowledge across time and space. On the basis of mental models, we grow our knowledge and wisdom through experiences and participative learning. Although in most areas of human conduct, primarily standard one-dimensional natural languages are used to express and share knowledge, we see the need for and use of two- and many-dimensional representational forms to be on the rise. One such technique is traditionally termed enterprise modeling.

Visual modeling is nowadays used for many purposes in most industrial sectors and application areas. For instance, the automotive industry has used visual process and product modelling since the late 1990s. In 2006 automotive industry started developing visual knowledge models to build configurable product platforms, aiming to realize integrated life-cycle operations. In new approaches to holistic design, product family design, systems engineering (SE), and IT the trend is towards model-based IT solutions using visual languages such as UML, BPMN, and IRTV.

2. Customer Challenges and Demands

In this chapter, we structure and describe the challenges that customers have wanted solutions to for years, but never received adequate IT support to approach. Many challenges have been attempted solved over and over again without success, and that is why many of them became industry slogans. A good example of a challenge never adequately solved is “requirements management and analyses,” or in other words being able to turn customer requirements into supplier requirements, specifications, and satisfactory designs. The material presented in this chapter is based on results from the ATHENA project, in particular on (Li et al. 2006).

3. Industrial Evolutions

This chapter presents a number of cases representing early approaches to Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM) solutions in precommercial EU projects, specifically the EXTERNAL (2003) and ATHENA (2004) EU projects. Although the current AKM approach is described in more detail in Chaps. 5 and 7–10, it is important to look back briefly at the developments that have brought us to where we are. The AKM technology is the result of a long ongoing learning process that we expect to go on for a number of years.

4. State of the Art of Enterprise Modeling

This chapter gives an overview of the state of the art and the state of industrial practice within enterprise modeling, reflecting the current market situation and industrial use of enterprise modeling technologies. The chapter is partly based on the material originally presented in ATHENA (2004).

5. Enterprise Knowledge Architecture (EKA)

As mentioned in Chaps. 1 and 3, the Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM) technology was originally invented/discovered in industrial attempts to build digital “industrial war rooms,” around 1990, and through studies and discussions with leading scientists. The inventor recognized that core enterprise innovation is within the four inter-dependable core knowledge dimensions of any industrial enterprise. Holistic, multilayered knowledge models can be used to capture aspects of these dimensions. Holistic models create coherent knowledge representations that are logically consistent and have reflective views, recursive processes, repetitive working solutions, and replicable structures of metadata. These intrinsic properties of participative and active knowledge, called the 4R’s, give us powerful development, integration, management, and reuse capabilities.

In this chapter, we describe the main principles and parts of AKM and EKA.

6. Approaches to Enterprise Solutions

Business analysts recognize that innovative design is the most important competitive factor for western manufacturing industries. In more and more industries, product platforms with dynamic modularization and configurable components are introduced to meet evolving diverse and contradicting customer, technology, and business requirements. Conventional IT applications are built to support routine information processing, rather than creative design work. Analysts claim that “IT doesn’t matter,” because IT does not extend the capabilities of the core of the business.

7. Introducing Active Knowledge Modeling in Industry

The Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM) approach was described briefly in Chap. 1. We describe in this chapter the overall approach of applying AKM in an enterprise or business network setting. The business networking knowledge space is generally denoted by four dimensions: Services, Networks, Projects, and Platforms (abbreviated SNPP). When employed in a customer delivery project, the four knowledge dimensions contributed by AKM will be customized through the target-specific modeling activities of the solutions modeling step. The AKM models of the approach, the methodology, and the platform change as customer solution models and operational solutions are scoped, used, and analyzed for validity. Purpose, guidelines, principles, language, and techniques for performing solutions modeling is therefore the prime purpose of this chapter

8. Families of Platforms and Architectures

This chapter presents the underlying Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM) technical platform, exemplified in particular with the instantiation of this platform developed in the MAPPER project.

A specific focus in on how we have layered different types of services. The term service is used today for denoting a wide range of concepts, from a hard-coded software function wrapped inside a SOAP/XML interface (a Web service) to the products and services a company sells and delivers.

9. Enterprise Design and Development

We will in this chapter present the different parts of CPPD as used in different parts of the C3S3P approach described in Chap. 7, indicating how it is using the different parts of the infrastructure described in Chaps. 5 and 8.

The CPPD methodologies and services are anchored in pragmatic product logic, open data definitions, and practical work processes, capturing local innovations and packaging them for repetition and reuse. Actually most of the components, such as the configurable product components (CPC) and the configurable visual workplaces (CVW), are based on proven and documented industrial methodologies. CPPD mostly reimplements them, applying the principles, concepts, and services of the AKM Platform.

10. Realizing the Knowledge Economy

This chapter discusses how the AKM approach and technology can help realizing the expectations of the knowledge or network economy, while simultaneously achieving improved innovation, stakeholder involvement and satisfaction, and competitive advantage. The AKM approach can turn business knowledge, innovative capabilities, and operational networking methods into shared manageable assets and decisive competitive instruments. Adopting the AKM approach also means building stronger competitive alliances, tighter business relations, and developing serviceteams as a new organizational form. Extending operational networks on the fly to involve students, interest organizations, standardization bodies, and policy-makers is performed by configuring role-specific Web-workplaces.

11. Toward Enterprise Visual Scenes

Enterprise Visual Scenes (EVS) can provide users with modeling approaches, user environments, and solutions for knowledge creation, sharing, rendering, engineering and work management and for meeting most of the industrial challenges discussed in Chap. 2.

We will now look around the next bends to uncover the potential for further developments in how we envision modeling, using, and developing enterprise knowledge as visual scenes, exploring 3D and 4D model rendering, and visual navigation and interaction.

We will first recap some of the main principles of our thinking. We will next present some existing applications exploring 3D and 4D rendering and finally present visions for where and how to develop and apply improved modeling, navigation, visualization, and analyses techniques. We will end the chapter looking at extending the way of visualizing knowledge even further to three-dimensional immersive environments.

12. Scientific Foundations of AKM Technology

In Chap. 3, we claimed the following: “The variations in knowledge from one enterprise to another are mostly changes in semantics, complexity in structural layers, visual representations and type-hierarchies of the four main enterprise knowledge dimensions, in particular of process and product aspects. So in order to model for solutions with coherence, consistency and reuse in evolving extended enterprises we must be able to separate business, knowledge and IT architectures and solutions.”

13. Enterprise Knowledge Spaces

In Chaps. 1 and 2 we introduced the concept of enterprise knowledge spaces. We will describe here the different spaces in more detail.

14. Summary and Directions

On one hand, some might point to a certain irony in presenting a book (using primarily one-dimensional alphabetic linear writing) on a topic touting the use of two and many-dimensional knowledge representations. On the other hand, even if traditional knowledge representation is not the best in all situations as we have argued for in the book, it does have some merit to present a linearization of the knowledge e.g., for making it easier for others to understand certain aspects. Although an Active Knowledge Modeling (AKM) tells many stories with precise meanings, thanks to the context, a written book tells one story, but leaves many interpretations, depending on the mental models of the readers. Therefore, we have tried to create as much context as possible from the first chapter. So what has been presented in this book is just one possible path through the AKM landscape.

Backmatter

Titel: Active Knowledge Modeling of Enterprises
verfasst von: Frank Lillehagen
John Krogstie
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-540-79416-5
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-79415-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79416-5