Combining Knowledge Management and Business Process Management – A Solution for Information Extraction from Business Process Models Focusing on BPM Challenges

In today’s dynamic environment all organizations need up-to-date knowledge for their operations that are based on business processes. Complex organizations use business process management (BPM) tools to model and manage these processes. BPM applications tends to model the organizational processes, together with the required information and other resources needed to perform each activity. BPM yields an overall context, but it is still static.

Our paper presents a solution to extract, organize and preserve knowledge embedded in organizational processes to enrich organizational knowledge base in a systematic and controlled way utilized in the PROKEX project. The proposed solution is to extract the knowledge from information stored in the process model in order to articulate, externalize and transfer it. Our paper focuses on the BPM aspects of the solution as we want to investigate it from the information systems perspective.

The novelty of the solution is based on the connection between process model and corporate knowledge base, where the process structure will be used for building up the knowledge structure. Common form of knowledge base is the ontology, which provides the conceptualization of a certain domain. By using the ontology and combining it with the process models, we connect knowledge management and business process management in a dynamic, systematic and well-controlled solution.