Inproceedings,

Task Journals as Means to Describe Temporal Task Aspects for Reuse in Task Patterns

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ECKM 2008 Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Knowledge Management., page 721 – 729. (2008)

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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