Knowledge Management and Information Retrieval: Some New Challenges

Change is one of the stable factors in many organisations. Therefor agility is essential for success and good management of knowledge is one of the key factors for success in such organisations. This document describes a model for the organisation of knowledge management. This model is based on a distinguishing of concepts of knowledge: the stock concept and the flow concepts. The importance of a knowledge management policy is stressed. In such a policy the key strategic knowledge requirements of an organisation are defined based upon the organisations mission, primary goals and strategy. Also the knowledge management infrastructure to implement such a policy is elaborated. Further the paper focuses on the requirements of information retrieval software for such a knowledge management infrastructure. It deal with the concept “document” and the need for user friendly functionality. It concludes that many of today’s search engines are too complicated and it advises to invest in the development of software that helps the user to use advanced functionality that retrieval systems have. One of the main deficiencies of modern retrieval software is that it is based on the presumption that the meaning of a document is completely and only depending on the document itself. It does not take the user into account and the domain from which he is searching. A document however should be interpreted in the terms of the user and his organisation. Modelling knowledge from the perspective of the user is one of the key challenges for the coming years.