Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
edited by all indiGo moderators. Beneath the announcements, the start page lists all
new articles in the user's discussion groups. This service replaces the subscription and
notification mechanism that is otherwise available on the users' personal home page
in Zeno.
For the introduction and operational phase of an instantiation of the indiGo
Methodology for a certain process model different discourse grammars will be
available. “info”, “question”, “comment”, “suggestion”, “example” are the article
labels during introduction, “observation”, “problem”, “suggestion”, “solution”,
“example” and “summary” are the article labels during operation. Link labels are in
both phases “re”, “pro”, “con”, “see also”. Qualifier will include “closed” to indicate
threads with a conclusion, and “invalid” to indicate threads that may have become
invalid due to modifications of the process model. To come back to the introductory
example, Ms Legrelle could have attached a “problem” to the guideline on payment
schedules, “re”sponded with a “suggestion” concerning small start-ups, and supported
it with a ”pro” “example” from the Hydra project.
4.4
CoIN-EF
Compared to the objectives of an organization as captured in its process models,
projects have a short-term perspective, oriented towards the goals of the project.
Therefore an organizational unit that is responsible for experience management is
required and has to be separated from the project teams. As already mentioned, such a
separate organizational unit is called experience factory (EF), which for the IESE is
operationalized by the CoIN team.
Beside the propagation of knowledge within IESE, CoIN-EF is used as a real-
world environment for the development and validation of technologies and methods
for goal-oriented EM. Until now IESE has gathered nearly three years of operational
experience in maintaining CoIN, and CoIN was successfully transferred to partners
and customers, for example in the
IPQM project
for continuous improvement of
hospitals in the German healthcare sector (Althoff, Bomarius et al. 1999). Based on
these experiences, the requirements of CoIN were widened towards an organization-
wide information and knowledge management system.
Within the integrated experience base (EB), all kinds of experience necessary for
daily business are stored (e.g., guidelines, or observations). Defined processes
populate the EB systematically with experience typically needed by IESE's project
teams. The retrieval of experiences from the EB is planned right at the start of the
build-up and supports a goal-oriented, context-sensitive, similarity-based retrieval of
different kinds of interrelated experiences.
4.4.1
Experiences in CoIN
Within CoIN-EF, lessons learned (LL) about project management are captured. A LL
can take on the form of an observation, a problem, guideline, pragmatic solution, or
an improvement suggestion. Each LL is personalized to allow a querying IESE
member to ask a colleague for further information. The context of these LLs is
modeled by the two concepts “project” and “process”. A “project” is a
characterization of the project where the LL was gained (e.g., person months,
