Facilitating knowledge flow through the enterprise

• Authors: Jeanette Bruno
• Venue: Proceedings of the tenth international conference on Information and knowledge management
• Year: 2001

This paper is concerned with the issues we encountered when attempting to achieve enterprise level knowledge reuse. We present 3 pilot studies where new visualization techniques were used to allow manufacturing and service operations take advantage of engineering knowledge embodied in 3D models. Though all these studies showed dramatic productivity increases, only one business unit from the studies is currently working to achieve the reuse. There are a number of reasons why this is so, but the key underlying theme is a lack of enterprise level commitment to knowledge sharing and a lack of an adequate knowledge architecture for sharing knowledge across organizational boundaries. We conclude with an approach for facilitating knowledge flow across functional units.