“Coordination of the information/ knowledge flow concerning project management issues within a process-oriented organization” – A case study of the German Aerospace Center DLR

Paper number

IAC-11,D5,2,12,x11224

Author

Mr. Ruediger Suess, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR), Germany

Year

2011

Abstract

Some years ago the German Aerospace Centre – DLR – shifted the orientation of its administrative activities within its administration from a pure organizational approach towards a process-enabled approach. DLR introduced a three-element process model: Corporate processes – core processes and support processes.  All activities within DLR are organized regarding this model frame. Therefore the corresponding knowledge that flows along these processes are not concentrated within one organ-izational unit but flows along several units across the whole organization.
Unlike several companies there is no necessity to an organizational approach that is called “knowl-edge management unit”. The process-oriented knowledge flow gives a different view of the organiza-tional and behavioral attitude of how an organization shares and captures its knowledge.
There fore it is difficult to catch the relevant information and provide them to the other employees. A more social-network based knowledge sharing platform is going to be introduced within DLR this summer. A short overview over this project named “Integrated knowledge management” will be given.
The purpose of the paper is to show how DLR as the national space agency and the national research centre plans to organize knowledge flow along processes within its organization. IT will be shown how DLR coordinates the knowledge flow along a process concerning project management related activities. The participants of the sessions can gain a different view of how the corporate manage-ment thinks and organizes the information flow towards a de-/central knowledge management or-ganized approach. 
One outcome of the analysis is the clear need for transparency of the interfaces, and the chance for the employees to organize themselves in a non-steered decentralized way. One more is that we don’t talk about knowledge management but the managing of information management and the knowledge about it.

Abstract document

IAC-11,D5,2,12,x11224.brief.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-11,D5,2,12,x11224.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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