Abstract
The reuse of work experience is the central topic of knowledge management (KM),
especially in the context of knowledge work. However, the focus of most KM systems is restricted to
the handling of knowledge artefacts such as documents, diagrams etc. as isolated entities. Moreover,
the work context and its temporal aspects, i.e., activities that take place at specific points of time and
are related to other activities, are mostly neglected. Even if there are best practice descriptions these
are less formalised and not accessible for IT systems. On the other hand, there are business process
management approaches that deal with dependencies in collaborative work activities but they
concentrate on the dependencies between tasks and neglect the KM aspects. Recently we have
proposed a task pattern approach to support the transfer of the experience of knowledge workers. To
realise the idea of task patterns we formalise the operational and temporal structure of tasks. Based
on Activity Theory we have developed a conceptualisation that fulfils these requirements. Tasks are
broken down into individual operations and occurring problems are described in a formal semantic
way and collected in Task Journals. These supply the knowledge worker with an overview of the most
important events and activities that represent the task execution and give knowledge workers access
to the resources employed in these activities. The Task Journal does not only provide the knowledge
worker with information about the task proceeding but it can also be used for task pattern creation,
i.e., formal work experience assets that are then distributed via a KM system. Since the individual
events or operations described in the Task Journal are formally represented, IT systems can support
knowledge workers in identifying similar tasks and in transferring assets from there to their own tasks.
In this way they decisively go beyond mere best practice descriptions.
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