A design knowledge management system to support collaborative information product evolution

The Internet has led to the widespread trade of digital information products. These products exhibit unusual properties such as high fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs. They need to be developed on compressed time frames by spatially and temporally distributed teams, have short lifecycles, and high perishability. This paper addresses the challenges that information product development (IPD) teams face. Drawing on the knowledge intensive nature of IPD tasks, we identify potential solutions to these problems that can be provided by a knowledge management system. We discuss a prototype Knowledge Management System (KMS) that supports linking of artifacts to processes, flexible interaction and hypermedia services, distribution annotation and authoring as well as providing visibility to artifacts as they change over time. Using a case from the publishing industry, we illustrate how-contextualized decision paths/traces provide a rich base of formal and informal knowledge that supports IPD teams. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.