Supporting Knowledge and Expertise Finding within Australias Defence Science and Technology Organisation

Like most other large R&D organisations [1,2] and professional services firms, DSTO is a project-centric organisation; projects are formed to address specific questions or problems, or to develop specific products. The nature of the outcomes of the projects undertaken by DSTO varies considerably, and can range from academic papers and technical reports, through to prototype and working system development, and to professional services and consulting engagements.

The work described in this paper is part of an ongoing knowledge management improvement program aimed at exploring: Methods to allow staff to build and maintain wide and detailed awareness of DSTO’s past, current and planned projects; Methods to enable staff to locate other staff with relevant skills, interests, abilities or experience; Low cost (in terms of time and effort) methods to support the development of communities of interest, and less-formal collaboration and sharing within the organisation; Organisational cultural and behavioural issues that may act as barriers to effective knowledge and expertise sharing. A prototype information system, the Automated Research Management System (ARMS), was developed to explore approaches to addressing these issues.

Section 2 discusses the nature of knowledge and knowledge management within the R&D environment, and describes the types of support for knowledge and expertise-finding needed within organisations such as DSTO. Section 3 describes ARMS and how it supports knowledge and expertise finding within DSTO. Section 4 outlines the ARMS trial and trial methodology, and Section 5 discusses the results of two studies undertaken as part of the ARMS trial. Finally, Section 6 discusses the implications and limitations of the work undertaken so far and describes potential areas for future work.

The main theoretical idea underpinning this work is that the knowledge important to an organisation, or that makes it unique or gives it a competitive advantage, is embedded in key elements that make up the organisation [3][4][5].

According to [3], this knowledge is embedded in three key organisational elements -the members of the organisation, the tools used within the organisation, and the tasks performed by the organisation. For many organisations, organisationally important knowledge is embedded within skills, experiences, expertise and competencies of the individuals that make up the organisation [1,3,6]. This is particularly true for R&D organisations [1] and other professional services organisations [5]. As well as people, significant organisational knowledge is embedded within the tools the organisation uses, including specialised physical hardware used as part of a manufacturing process, for example, through to conceptual or intellectual tools such as consulting or analysis frameworks [3,7]. The third key element identified by [3] is the tasks performed by the organisation. Tasks reflect an organisation’s goals, intention and purpose [3,5,7].

For R&D, engineering and other professional services organisations, key knowledge is also embedded within the products or other kinds of outcome the organisation produces. The development of products or other kinds of outcome uniquely combines together the organisation’s staff, tools and tasks to address a particular question or problem, or to develop some kind of product, and can be seen as uniquely embedding the application of the organisation’s collective knowledge, skills, experiences and expertise within a particular domain, to address a particular question or problem or to develop some kind of product [1,7,9,10].

As discussed in [11], knowledge management is centred on two, potentially limiting, philosophical foundations. The first is the idea that tacit and explicit knowledge are two distinctly different forms or types of knowledge, rather than simply being a dimension along which all knowledge exists. The underlying assumption that tacit and explicit knowledge are different leads to the conclusion that a key goal of knowledge management is the codification of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge [12]. However, as [11] points out, not all knowledge can (or should) be codified, and any knowledge management approaches that rely on the codification of knowledge are likely to fail. The second philosophical foundation that knowledge management rests on is the datainformation -knowledge continuum: the idea that information is in some way better data and that knowledge

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