Knowledge transfer in business process modelling

• Main Author: Schiele, Felix.
• Other Authors: Laux, Fritz ; Connolly, Thomas
• Published: University of the West of Scotland 2015
• Subjects: 658.4
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.690908

Knowledge is an important resource, whose transfer is still not completely understood. The underlying belief of this thesis is that knowledge cannot be transferred directly from one person to another but must be converted for the transfer and therefore is subject to loss of knowledge and misunderstanding. This thesis proposes a new model for knowledge transfer and empirically evaluates this model. The model is based on the belief that knowledge must be encoded by the sender to transfer it to the receiver, who has to decode the message to obtain knowledge. To prepare for the model this thesis provides an overview about models for knowledge transfer and factors that influence knowledge transfer. The proposed theoretical model for knowledge transfer is implemented in a prototype to demonstrate its applicability. The model describes the influence of the four layers, namely code, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic layers, on the encoding and decoding of the message. The precise description of the influencing factors and the overlapping knowledge from sender and receiver facilitate its implementation. The application area of the layered model for knowledge transfer was chosen to be business process modelling. Business processes incorporate an important knowledge resource of an organisation as they describe the procedures for the production of products and services. The implementation in a software prototype allows a precise description of the process by adding semantic to the simple business process modelling language used. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a new model for knowledge transfer, which shows the process of knowledge transfer in greater detail and highlights influencing factors. The implementation in the area of business process modelling reveals the support provided by the model. An expert evaluation indicates that the implementation of the proposed model supports knowledge transfer in business process modelling. The results of the qualitative evaluation are supported by the findings of a qualitative evaluation, performed as a quasi-experiment with a pre-test/post-test design and two experimental groups and one control group. Mann-Whitney U tests indicated that the group that used the tool that implemented the layered model performed significantly better in terms of completeness (the degree of completeness achieved in the transfer) in comparison with the group that used a standard BPM tool (Z = 3.057, p = 0.002, r = 0.59) and the control group that used pen and paper (Z = 3.859, p < 0.001, r = 0.72). The experiment indicates that the implementation of the layered model supports the creation of a business process and facilitates a more precise representation.