A knowledge management application to support knowledge sharing in a design engineering community

The changing competitive landscape has brought new forces to bear on the manner in which new products are developed. These forces have put the creation and dissemination of knowledge at the centre of many firms’ new product development (NPD) strategies. Organizational models to support NPD have evolved over the years and a significant aspect of this evolution has been the emergence of organizations that are decentralized and distributed across the globe. Improvements in communication infrastructure have facilitated this trend. These new organizational forms have placed stresses and strains on firm’s ability to efficiently transfer knowledge across its organization units and it has been observed that knowledge dissemination can run aground once organization unit boundaries are encountered. A small number of empirical analyses of knowledge management systems (KMS) applications to support new product development have been done. These analyses have pointed to a dual requirement in this area – firstly, an organizational environment that promotes knowledge dissemination and secondly, an IS infrastructure to support collaboration in and across new product development teams. While some of the extant literature on KMS to support knowledge dissemination stresses the importance of “people-topeople” KMS applications and the area of knowledge discovery is starting to get attention, there appears to be a dearth of published material on the issues surrounding the actual implementation of such systems in an industrial setting. In particular, the use of such systems in the context of NPD organizations does not appear to be well understood. This research hopes to address some of these shortcomings. This paper focuses on an application that has been developed by the Technical and Marketing IS (TMIS) group in ADI’s NPD organization. The purpose of the application is to facilitate the sharing of technical knowledge in the design engineering community in ADI.