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SimKnowledge—Analyzing impact of knowledge management measures on team organizations with multi agent-based simulation

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Abstract

Even though there is abundant literature on successful cases of organizations applying knowledge management (KM) measures, many KM initiatives have failed to achieve their knowledge and business goals. In order to foster decisions about the design of such initiatives, information is required on success factors and barriers when selecting KM measures. Multi agent-based simulation (MABS) is suggested as instrument to investigate potential effects of KM measures on dependent variables such as sharing of knowledge in organizations or business performance. For such a simulation, the concept of knowledge sharing, influencing factors and their impact on business and knowledge goals are modeled based on an extensive multi-disciplinary literature survey. An extensive domain model is operationalized in a simulation model which is then further simplified and implemented in a MABS tool used for a series of experiments contrasting results with/without KM measures, specifically skill and experience management. Skill management is found highly sensitive with respect to conditions of application and has no significant impact on knowledge or business goals. Experience management positively impacts knowledge and business goals. Personal documentation leads to specialist, project debriefings to generalist knowledge workers. Finally, the paper discusses the simulation’s limitations and further areas of application.

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Notes

  1. For simplicity reasons, in all functions only the utility is shown instead of expected utility as used in the original work.

  2. Meyer, A. (2002/2003/ 2004): Wer verdient wie viel? Ergebnisse der c’t-Gehaltsumfrage. c’t magazin für computer und technik (06), 110–119/118–127/106–113.

  3. Krischer, T., IG-Metall (2003/2004): Entgelt in der IT-Branche. 5./6. Erhebung, IG-Metall, Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

  4. http://dice.salary.com/salarywizard/layoutscripts/swzl_titleselect.asp

  5. Uneven numbers result from the design with 1 CEO, X project managers and 3*X software developers.

  6. Skill is calculated as the sum of knowledge of an agent with respect to the four domains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IPI GmbH, Untere Industriestraße 5, 91586, Lichtenau, Germany

    René Peinl

  2. Department of Information Systems, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Ronald Maier

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  1. René Peinl
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  2. Ronald Maier
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Correspondence to René Peinl.

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Peinl, R., Maier, R. SimKnowledge—Analyzing impact of knowledge management measures on team organizations with multi agent-based simulation. Inf Syst Front 13, 621–636 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-010-9241-5

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