The FP5 European RTD project DECOR (Delivery of Context -Sensitive Organizational Knowledge) developed, consolidated, and tested a total solution for business-process oriented knowledge management (BPOKM ), including a business process analysis method and tool, a business-process oriented intelligent knowledge archive system, and a workflow enactment, tightly coupled with the archive, in order to pro-actively offer to the user context -sensitive knowledge and information services. Besides a short introduction into the general approach, this paper reports on the case study results and tries to assess the relevance of BPOKM approaches for Concurrent Enterprising.

&Knowledge management efforts focus much on the strategic applications of knowledge-related initiatives and not so much on their implications at the level of concrete business processes. On the other hand, business process management efforts have not concentrated on leveraging knowledge. In this paper we attempt to fill that gap by developing a tool for proactive, context-sensitive delivery of knowledge. We focus on the modelling of knowledge-intensive business processes and we develop a framework for modelling this type of processes that explicitly considers knowledge-related tasks and knowledge objects. We present a tool that is an implementation of our theoretical meta-model and realises proactive, context-sensitive delivery of knowledge, integrated with the workflow enactment. As an example, we sketch one case study, the process for granting full old-age pension as it is performed in the Greek Social Security Institution, discussing the benefits derived from applying our tool. Finally, we draw the main conclusions of our work and discuss further research directions. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

IT support for knowledge workers in their daily work can take many different guises: groupware systems and information retrieval tools help to exploit and develop function knowledge (how to perform a given activity, or function), while workflow management systems address the process knowledge (which activities to perform in which temporal-logical order, normally modelled in a rigid manner for clearly structured processes). However, what is missing so far in business process oriented knowledge management, is an environment that (z) integrates the business process and knowledge management aspects of weakly structured knowledge work, and (ii) actively supports the worker in using and adding knowledge resources. This paper presents an approach to support knowledge-intensive business processes. As an example we sketch a case study from the Greek public sector.

In this paper we present a new approach for integrating Business Process Management and Knowledge Management. We focus on the modelling of weakly-structured knowledge-intensive business processes. We develop a framework for modelling this type of processes that explicitly considers knowledge-related tasks and knowledge objects and present a workflow tool that is an implementation of our theoretical meta-model. As an example, we sketch one case study, the process for granting full old age pension as it is performed in the Greek Social Security Institution. Finally we briefly describe some related approaches and compare them to our work and draw the main conclusions and further research directions.

The DECOR approach to Business Process Oriented Knowledge Management (BPOKM) is based upon an extended Business Process Modelling, including automatable knowledge retrieval activities, additional knowledge management tasks and sub-processes, and additional process variables used to instruct the latter two. In this paper we present the DECOR Business Process Modelling Method and a software tool to support it. The concepts are briefly illustrated with a use case from the social security sector.

IT support for knowledge workers in their daily work can take many different guises: groupware systems and information access and retrieval tools support knowledge processes, while workflow management covers the support for rigidly structured processes. However, what is missing so far is an environment that integrates the business process and knowledge management aspects of weakly-structured knowledge work and actively supports the worker in using and adding to knowledge resources. This paper aims to present a new approach to support weakly-structured knowledge-intensive business processes. As an example we sketch a case study from the Greek public sector.

Work in today’s economic organisations is either performed through the execution of continuous operations or through the implementation of one-off projects; hence one can distinguish between “operation-centric” and “project-centric” business environments. New information and communication technologies facilitate the introduction of innovative organisational structures in both environments. Based on the term “virtual organisation”, which is used for describing the new organisational structures in operation-centric environments, we introduce the term “virtual consortium” for project-centric ones and provide an analysis of the business processes of a virtual consortium. We concentrate in the construction sector, as one of the most suitable application domains to test the new concept and related systems. Focusing on one of the most critical processes of a virtual consortium, the bidding/tendering process, we review the existing information systems over the Internet that support this process for construction projects. Our results show that although there are a substantial number of systems that support searching for call for tenders, few of them provide support for other vital items of the bidding/tendering process, such as robust collaboration facilities for the virtual consortium formation and for the management of the bid. We then present the SupplyPoint system, which has been developed in order to electronically support and automate the whole tendering/bidding process of virtual consortia. Supplypoint provides in addition to what existing systems already do a collaboration platform that facilitates, in a virtual manner, the formation of consortia.

We briefly promote the idea of possible IT support business-process oriented knowledge management (BPOKM) and sketch some basic approaches to achieve this goal. Then we describe the DECOR (Delivery of context-sensitive organisational knowledge) project, which develops, tests, and consolidates methods and tools for BPOKM. In the DECOR project, three end-user environments serve as test-beds for validation and iterative improvement of innovative approaches to build: (i) knowledge archives organised around formal representations of business processes to facilitate navigation and access, (ii) active information delivery services which offer the user in a context-sensitive manner helpful information from the knowledge archive, and (iii) methods for an organisation analysis from the knowledge perspective, required as supporting methods to design and introduce the former two systems Finally we present the basic modules of the DECOR toolkit.