THE INFORMATION/ KNOWLEDGE FLOW WITHIN A KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION – IT'S ALL ABOUT PEOPLE - A CASE STUDY OF THE GERMAN AEROSPACE CENTER DLR

摘要

Last year German Aerospace Centre - DLR – started to reorganize its knowledge management processes. DLR facesa huge necessity of knowledge gaining but has also the need for knowledge logistics, e.g. capturing, storing anddistributing. Knowledge that flows along these processes is not concentrated within one organizational unit butflows along several units across the whole organization. The process-oriented knowledge flow gives a different viewof the organizational and behavioral attitude of how an organization shares and captures its knowledge.There is a huge knowledge database regarding all the different aspects of knowledge in DLR. The first idea was hereto install a pure project database. But this could not be enough. Knowledge is more than data and information andcan only be created by individuals. We found out that not the Information Technology is the key to a successfulknowledge management but the people are.Therefore a new project was launched: "Establishing an integrated knowledge management system". Within this andamong other activities a more social-network oriented and also basic knowledge sharing platform is going to beintroduced within DLR. This is not only an IT-based platform but deals also with ideas, events, trainings, discussionsand so on. By asking the employees we learned a lot about their needs concerning knowledge. Many synergiescould be found and still can be raised out of the knowledge pool which consists mainly of employees. Their specialneeds focused on a more social-network based knowledge sharing platform, which is going to be introduced withinDLR.The purpose of the paper is to show how DLR plans to organize knowledge along processes and people within itsorganization. One important outcome of the analysis is the clear need for transparency of the interfaces, and thechance for the employees to publish their knowledge to other employees easily. An overview over this projectnamed "Establishing an integrated knowledge management system " will be given.