Development Methods for Knowledge Intensive Applications

The majority of web-based electronic commerce applications to date have concentrated on consumer to business connections primarily concerned with getting information or placing orders. There is now a growing area more concerned with setting up business processes within and between enterprises using Internet technologies (Kalakota and Robinson, 1999) for processes such as supply chain management, client relationship management or selling chain management. Such processes are characterized in a number of ways. First of all there are the traditional transaction based applications primarily based on EDI that serve to support predefined transactions. There is now also a trend to what are commonly known as knowledge intensive processes whose goal is to use the collective knowledge of the enterprise to develop new products and services (Riggins, 1998) that can give the enterprise competitive advantage. Such processes usually require the capture and combination of both tacit and explicit knowledge from a number of specialized areas (Grant, 1996). In many processes knowledge creation most often results in new documents that pass through a process designed to capture and structure tacit and explicit knowledge. A typical empirical innovation process defined by Kuczmarski (1997). Knowledge intensive processes do not necessarily produce physical objects but can be reports, procedures, plans, proposals and responses to proposals. Within public enterprises these include requirements to devise new ways of working to provide new services at ever-lower costs, which in turn call for ways to bring expert knowledge together to formulate plans or new processes.