PLANNING AND INTEGRATION OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT:KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING

2. KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING

Communication and Cooperation

Communication is a further basis for cooperation. It guarantees the continuous exchange of data, information, and knowledge. Particularly dynamic processes, like the development of innovative prod- ucts, demand great willingness to communicate from the development partners, especially when the partners have not worked together before. Project partners often complain about the great expenditure of time for meetings, telephone calls, and the creation and exchange of documents. If partners are not located nearby, resource problems mean that small and medium-sized companies can arrange personal meetings at short notice only with great difficulty. Nevertheless, face-to-face communication is important because it helps the partners to build up trust and confidence. An information exchange via phone or fax is an insufficient substitute. Especially for small companies, trust is an important factor because it gives them the ability to reduce burdensome expenditures such as frequent coordi- nation and comprehensive documentations. The dynamic in a network of cooperating partners requires a higher degree of communication than most companies are used to because spontaneous agreements concerning the further development process are often necessary. Above all, the manner of commu- nication between the partners has to be altered. Continuous advancement in knowledge and the time pressure put on the development of new products make quick feedback necessary if any deviations from the original planning emerge.

How can communication be improved for the movement of knowledge? There is a difference between explicit knowledge, which is documented, such as on paper or electronically, as language, sketch, or model, and implicit knowledge, which exists only in the heads of the employees.

Another distinction to be made regarding communication is that between the synchronous exchange of knowledge, where partners can communicate at the same time, and the asynchronous exchange, where the transmission and the reception of the message do not happen simultaneously, such as the sending of documents via e-mail.

In most cases of cooperation, exactly this relation is made: implicit knowledge is exchanged synchronously via phone or face to face, and explicit knowledge is exchanged asynchronously via documents. As a consequence, implicit knowledge remains undocumented and explicit knowledge is not annotated. This is a great obstacle to rapid reception of knowledge. Support here is offered by telecooperation systems, which allow communication from computer to computer. Besides docu- ments, pictures, sketches, CAD models, and videos, language can also be exchanged. This way, documents, pictures, and so on can be explained and annotated. By using special input devices, it is possible to incorporate handwritten notes or sketches. This facilitates the documentation of implicit knowledge.

These systems have a further advantage for the integration of knowledge. Learning theory tells us that the reception of new knowledge is easier if several input channels of the learner are occupied simultaneously.

Knowledge-intensive cooperation processes need coordination that is fundamentally different from conventional regulations and control mechanisms. A particular feature of knowledge-intensive pro- cesses is that they can hardly be planned. It is impossible to know anything about future knowledge— it is not available today. The more knowledge advances in a project, the higher the probability that previous knowledge will be replaced by new knowledge. Gaining new knowledge may make a former agreement obsolete for one partner. As a consequence, it will sometimes be necessary to give up the previous procedure, with its fixed milestones, work packages, and report cycles, after a short time. The five modules of RPD can be of great help here:

1. Plan and conceive

2. Design

3. Prototyping

4. Check and

5. Evaluate

However, they do not proceed sequentially, as in traditional models. A complete product is not in a certain, exactly-defined development phase. These development projects have an interlocked, networked structure of activities. Single states are determined by occurrences, like test results, which are often caused by external sources, sometimes even in different companies. Instead of a sequential procedure, an iterative, evolutionary process is initiated. But this can function only if the framework for communication is established as described above.

Traditional product-development processes aspire to a decrease in knowledge growth with pre- ceding development time. According to the motto ‘‘Do it right from the start,’’ one aim is usually to minimize supplementary modifications. New knowledge is not appreciated; it might provoke modi- fications of the original concept. RPD, on the other hand, is very much knowledge oriented. Here, the process is kept open for new ideas and changes, such as customer demands and technical im- provements. This necessitates a different way of thinking and alternative processes.

Knowledge-integrated processes are designed according to standards different from those usually applied to business process reengineering. The aim is not a slimming at all costs, but rather the robustness of the process. The motto here is ‘‘If the knowledge currently available to me is not enough to reach my target, I have enough time for the necessary qualification and I have the appro- priate information technology at my disposal to fill the gap in my knowledge.’’

The knowledge-management process has to be considered a direct component of the value-added process. According to Probst et al. (1997), the knowledge-management process consists of the fol- lowing steps: setting of knowledge targets, identification of knowledge, knowledge acquisition, knowl- edge development, distribution of knowledge, use of knowledge, and preservation and evaluation of knowledge.

For each of these knowledge process modules, the three fields of organization, human resource management, and information technology are considered. After recording and evaluating the actual state, the modules are optimized with regard to these mentioned fields. The number of iterations is influenced by the mutual dependencies of the modules (Prieto et al. 1999).

From the experiences already gained from R&D cooperation projects the following conclusion can be drawn: if the knowledge-management modules are integrated into the development process and supported by a suitable IT infrastructure, the exchange of knowledge between team members becomes a customer–supplier relationship, as is the case in the value-added process itself. This enables effective and efficient coordination of the project.

Knowledge Integration

For distributed, interdisciplinary teams it is of great significance that the different persons involved in a project base their work on a common knowledge basis. The cooperating experts have to be able to acquire a basic knowledge of their partners’ work contents and processes and their way of thinking in only a short time. Function models and design decisions cannot be communicated without a common basis. Knowledge integration is therefore the basis of communication and coordination in a cooperation. Without a common understanding of the most important terms and their context, it is not possible to transport knowledge to the partners. As a consequence a coordination of common activities becomes impossible. Growing knowledge integration takes time and generates costs. On the other hand, it meliorates the cooperation because few mistakes are made and results are increas- ingly optimal in a holistic sense. A particular feature of knowledge integration in R&D projects is its dynamic and variable character due to turbulent markets and highly dynamic technological de- velopments. Experiences gained in the field of teamwork made clear that the first phase of a freshly formed (project) team has to be devoted to knowledge integration, for the reasons mentioned above. The task of knowledge integration is to systematize knowledge about artifacts, development processes, and cooperation partners, as well as the respective communication and coordination tools, and to make them available to the cooperation partners. The significance of knowledge integration will probably increase if the artifact is new, as in the development of a product with a new functionality or, more commonly, a highly innovative product. If the project partners have only a small intersection of project-specific knowledge, the integration of knowledge is also very important because it neces- sitates a dynamic process of building knowledge.

To find creative solutions, it is not enough to know the technical vocabulary of the other experts involved. Misunderstandings are often considered to be communication problems, but they can mostly be explained by the difficult process of knowledge integration.

Which knowledge has to be integrated? First, the knowledge of the different subject areas. Be- tween cooperating subject areas, it is often not enough simply to mediate facts. In this context, four levels of knowledge have to be taken into consideration. In ascending order, they describe an in- creasing comprehension of coherence within a subject area.

1. Knowledge of facts (‘‘know-what’’) forms the basis for the ability to master a subject area.

This knowledge primarily reflects the level of acquiring ‘‘book knowledge.’’

2. Process knowledge (‘‘know-how’’) is gained by the expert through the daily application of his knowledge. Here, the transfer of his theoretical knowledge takes place. To enable an exchange on this level, it is necessary to establish space for experiences, which allows the experts to learn together or from one another.

3. The level of system understanding (‘‘know-why’’) deals with the recognition of causal and systemic cohesion between activities and their cause and effect chains. This knowledge enables the expert to solve more complex problems that extend into other subject areas.

4. Ultimately, the level of creative action on one’s own initiative, the ‘‘care-why,’’ has to be regarded (e.g., motivation). The linkage of the ‘‘care-why’’ demands a high intersection of personal interests and targets.

Many approaches to knowledge integration concentrate mainly on the second level. Transferred to the knowledge integration in a R&D cooperation, this means that it is not enough to match the know-what knowledge. The additional partial integration of the know-how and the know-why is in most cases enough for a successful execution of single operative activities. The success of the whole project, however, demands the integration of the topmost level of the care-why knowledge. A pre- condition here is common interests between the project partners. This is also a major difference between internal cooperation and cooperation with external partners. In transferring internal proce- dures to projects with external partners, the importance of the care-why is often neglected because within a company the interests of the cooperation partners do not differ very much; it is one company, after all (Warschat and Ganz 2000).

The integration process of the four levels of knowledge described above is based on the exchange of knowledge between project partners. Some knowledge is documented as CAD models or sketches, reports, and calculations. This is explicit knowledge, but a great share of knowledge is not docu- mented and based on experience; it is implicit.

This model, developed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1997), describes the common exchange of knowledge as it occurs in knowledge management.