Just-In-Time Access to Implicit Knowledge with Peer-to-Peer Community Systems

Abstract. Just-in-Time Knowledge Management (JITKM) is a paradigm that brings together the benefits from traditional Knowledge Management (KM) with the Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing concept. Knowledge, when seen as goods, needs to be accessible if it is needed for knowledge work. Therefore tedious retrieval processes need to be replaced with ad-hoc communications with those persons that best match the demanded expertise. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems offer real-time solutions for the management of pieces of explicit information. But also the access to the important, implicit part of knowledge that is bound to humans can be supported by P2P applications: the paper proposes tools that support the search for the optimal communication partner. The choice is based on a match between the content of the question and the profile of the expert. Only few prototype implementations of this new type of KM system are currently available. The paper explains the concept of the iK now P2P system.