D. Karagiannis, R. Telesko 13-1 The EU-Project PROMOTE: A Process-oriented Approach for Knowledge Management D. Karagiannis BOC GmbH Bäckerstraße 5/3 1010 Vienna, Austria / University of Vienna Department of Knowledge Engineering Brünner Straße 72 1210 Vienna, Austria R. Telesko University of Vienna Department of Knowledge Engineering Brünner Straße 72 1210 Vienna, Austria telesko@dke.univie.ac.at dk@dke.univie.ac.at Abstract PROMOTE is a EU project dealing with knowledge management and running in the IST programme, Nr. IST-1999-11658 [IST00]. The overall goal of the project is to develop an integrated framework for process-oriented knowledge management based on the existing business process management toolkit ADONIS ® , to validate it by developing a product named PROMOTE ® and to test it with end user companies from the financial and insurance sector. Information about the project can also be found under the website http://www.boc- eu.com/promote. 1 Process-oriented Knowledge Management In this paper we propose knowledge management to be based on processes. A process-based point of view enables - similar to business process management - the development of an integrated framework for documenting, analyzing and improving knowledge activities. As opposed to a purely document-centric perspective for knowledge management we examine what processes create knowledge objects like documents, human expertise etc. and how to represent this knowledge in an organizational memory (OM) so that employees can it easily retrieve and manipulate. But knowledge management activities cannot be separated from other business processes, because knowledge is generated and used in business processes. Up to now, there have been two approaches to specify knowledge management activities: The knowledge management point of view focuses on knowledge management activities while neglecting the relation to other business processes. A favorite way of conceptualizing knowledge management is to divide it into tasks like knowledge identification, generation, acquisition, storage, distribution and usage. However, in a company different knowledge objectives and business processes exist that determine which knowledge is valuable and also influence how it is acquired, stored and used. The knowledge management tasks mentioned above need to be adapted to these different objectives and customized accordingly. From the business process point of view knowledge management activities are part of business processes. Work in this direction mainly supports business process execution by context-sensitive information retrieval and active presentation of relevant information [Sta99], [Abe98]. However, knowledge use is only one task of knowledge management. It is not ingenious to specify knowledge management activities for each business process separately, because many activities occur in a similar manner in various business processes. In this paper we present an approach to be realized within the PROMOTE project that combines knowledge management processes (KMPs) and business processes. This means in particular that we do not favor any of these kinds of processes. Both, KMPs and business processes, are specified and the relation between activities of both processes can be explicitly modelled. 1.1 PROMOTE: A Multi-dimensional Approach The overall goal is to adapt the existing “Business process management systems” methodology for realizing “Process-oriented knowledge management”, to validate it by developing a product named PROMOTE ® , and to test it in end user companies from the financial services sector. PROMOTE  guides the accumulation, retrieval and distribution of product-process related knowledge and employees’ know-how, and serves as an on-line support tool for knowledge managers as well as for the employees who generate and use knowledge. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. Proc. of the Third Int. Conf. on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM2000) Basel, Switzerland, 30-31 Oct. 2000, (U. Reimer, ed.) http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-34/