Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Supporting knowledge-intensive work in public administration processes.

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

Managing Knowledge in Weakly-Structured Administrative Processes

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

Business-Process Oriented Delivery of Knowledge through Domain Ontologies

We shortly motivate 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 . 1. Motivation: Business-Process Oriented Knowledge Management Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) [15,23] have been predominant business trends from the mid eighties until the nineties, and are now becoming "serious tools" instead of a hype; in the decade from the mid nineties on, the most "fashionable" trend seems to be Knowledge Management (KM) [8,9]. Although both topics are usually discussed independently, there are important obvious similarities: both KM and BPR aim at similar economic targets like quality or efficiency improvements; both initiatives require a clear organisational take-up and strategic planning at the begin; KM as well as BPR requires an integrated suite of motivational, organisational and technological tools; technological support for both approaches builds upon compreh..

Public Administrations

semantics-based software framework for ensurin