Active Knowledge Modeling

Roles is a key concept in social and organizational studies and is a hot topic in these application areas; Enterprise Role Management (ERM), Role Engineering Assessment (REA), Role Life-cycle Management (RLM), Social Networking for Business, Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Holistic Design of Active Knowledge Architectures. The definition of identity, authentication, authorization, accessibility, and traceability are security needs driving this growing interest.

In most IT applications authorization is isolated from the tasks, the enabling methods and data. Roles and role-specific workplaces with tasks and views, are not supported. Coherence, coordination and collaboration are poorly supported. Workplaces are programmed and can not be designed in context-rich workspaces. Roles operate in workspaces created by work-centric and situated knowledge.

In this post we therefore look at the benefits of designing roles in context-rich workspaces. How structured roles and work-centric knowledge form the basis for a new form of smart organization. A smart organization of service-teams must be able to design and engineer roles and workspaces as projects evolve to capture practical rules and methods. Agile project teams with clear responsibilities and rules for providing services to each other should be designed as part of project design. Read the rest of this entry »