Knowledge Management and Axiomatic Design

The objective of this paper is to explain how axiomatic design can be used both to design a knowledge management system and to formulate the knowledge in the system. Knowledge is an important part of the capital of any company. The capacity to extract value from knowledge depends on the abilities to locate the essential knowledge, have it formulated in an appropriate manner, and apply it at the right time to find the best solution to a problem. Much of what has been written about knowledge management principally stresses the importance of management and the value in utilizing the knowledge effectively. However, in the existing publications, it is frequently not clear exactly how the knowledge system should be designed or how to formulate that knowledge within the system in order to extract optimal value. In this work, it is postulated that the value- adding intellectual activity in an enterprise can be formulated as an engineering design problem, using axiomatic design. Axiomatic design formulates a decomposition structure that includes four domains: customer, functional, physical, and process. Knowledge exists within the entities in domains and in the relation between the entities in adjacent domains. Once an entity has been identified in one domain, a properly designed knowledge management system can suggest all the known solutions in the adjacent domains, and the interactions between the domains, along with details about how well these solutions work.