Would you like to know who knows? Connecting employees based on process-oriented knowledge mapping

Publication date: July 2016
Source:Decision Support Systems, Volume 87
Author(s): Michael Leyer, Christian Schneider, Nina Claus
Employees' knowledge as the guarantor of companies' success is an important asset of the enterprises' value. However, this knowledge is often not optimally used or even visible and available for employees and management within companies. This intangible knowledge leads to continuously reinvented wheels within organisations and employees misspend time learning processes in a cumbersome way on their own. To overcome this problem, we present a new approach aimed at connecting employees socially. The main novelty is the use of the organisation's business processes as basis for connecting employees by indicating their process-related areas of expertise. The goal is to enable enduring sharing and distribution of knowledge within an organisation to support decision making in process execution. Our evaluation results from two financial services companies show that employees perceive such a network as very helpful. Our approach leads to easier access, better search results and more opportunities to connect knowledge with other employees.

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