Intentional Analysis for Distributed Knowledge Management

Current knowledge management (KM) systems tend to presuppose a centralized approach to managing knowledge, assuming a single classification schema or ontology. In reality, organizations consist of many autonomous individuals and units cooperating and competing to pursue private as well as common goals. Knowledge needs exist from local perspectives as well as across different perspectives. Novel approaches to knowledge management aim at taking into account these properties and at exploiting the distributed and local nature of knowledge in the organizations. A systematic approach for introducing KM technology solutions based on these approaches requires a deep analysis of the interests and intents of strategic organizational actors and of the dependency relationships among them. This paper describes an approach based on intentional modelling techniques, aimed at capturing the strategic dependencies in the organizational setting, so that requirements for the KM system may emerge in a natural and well motivated manner. Actors, communities and their practices, as well as actors playing the role of mediators among communities, boundary objects and encounters are identified while conducting the analysis of the organizational setting, together with coordination mechanisms, such as perspective making and perspective taking processes. The analysis is pursued further, till the role of specific distributed KM technologies to be applied in the organization start emerging. Two examples from a health care administration case study are used to illustrate the approach