A Knowledge-Based Approach to Support Decision Making Process in Project-Oriented Collaboration

For many organizations and countries alike, innovation and knowledge management (KM) are no longer luxury items, but rather necessities and a means of sustaining economic development and competitiveness. KM plays a vital role supporting innovation in the sense that innovation often draws upon lessons from the past, sometimes those that have been forgotten, or that can be put together into new combinations to produce new results. Project-based collaboration gained a new dimension within the Internet era. Sharing and capitalisation of knowledge within a project can be highly amplified through the use of Internet services, since it can reach a bigger audience in a more effective way. Thus, research have tackled these aspects providing good models and tools to support knowledge cycle (capture, creation, cleansing, sharing, dissemination, and capitalisation) in a project-based context. Providing functionalities to share best practices and lessons learned from previous projects can be an effective means of implementing lean processes inside organizations as a response to organizational business problems. Knowledge is generated in a continuous flow involving sharing and conversion, considering individuals, communities, and the organisation itself. KM is more than a balanced emphasis on knowledge creation and sharing. It must also recognize the presence of learning systems in organizations. How people and groups, in complex social systems, organise themselves around learning and problem-solving, or even to detect problems may have nothing to do with how and what they do at their operating level, and usually does not. The work presented here describes a conceptual model focused on collaborative work performed in a project-based context, where the knowledge transformation processes proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi in their SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, and Internalization) model within the knowledge spiral, are used in an evolving way by the knowledge workers involved in a given project. Each project represents a potential environment for the generation of new knowledge which can be capitalised on new projects. Our approach, which is being validated under the scope of the CoSpaces Integrated Research Project, intends to support professionals and working teams by enhancing decision making on co-located and distributed project meetings, improving project conduction through the anticipation of problems, deviations, solutions, etc., relying on two main elements: (i) ontology-based classification and indexation of similarities among projects; and (ii) historical data analysis through data mining techniques (issues & solutions) produced at each decisional gate. This can be achieved by a knowledge system based on collaboration models and contextualized information which is shared and used by knowledge workers. Results achieved so far and future goals pursued by this work are also presented here.