AKRI (and earlier the NWAIAG) has been involved in a subject that came to be known as Knowledge Management for several years. The information that follows charts the development of Knowledge Management within AKRI and provides some flavour of the work done and those that contributed to it.
From 1988 to 1994 the NWAIAG developed and promoted Knowledge Based Systems within Industry. Several seminars and workshops were held including looking at early systems that were in operation in several regional businesses. The NWAIAG, with support from Blackburn College organised and ran several workshops that helped company representatives to use and understand Expert System Tools. The NWAIAG was part of the DTIs Knowledge Based Systems project between 1992 and 1993 and a collaborative group from industry working on this project produced an expert system demonstrator that gave advice on energy management to companies. This work actually grew into a major project with the Energy Efficiency Office and the result of this was an Energy Efficiency Advisor system called EMMA. Background work also featured studies and seminars on knowledge elicitation, Neural Networks, Object Programming, Knowledge Analysis, Genetic Algorithms, Data Mining and Graphic user interface to name but a few.
The realisation that knowledge in business and industry concerned much more with people than computer systems developed from a workshop on Developing People. A keynote talk was given by Anna Hart from the University of Central Lancashire. Although several other computer focused events took place around the same time a momentum developed that considered an integrated knowledge resource rather than an isolated system.
The article about the development of KM1 contains a more detailed look at what represented a very significant commitment to research in Knowledge Management by AKRI. The effects of this work are still evident today and the lessons learned from this project have had a significant impact of later developments of Structural Knowledge Auditing.
The KM1 development took place in an environment of meetings, seminars, workshops and parallel user interface and visualisation research. By the time the AKRI was launched in 2000, there was an established workshop series for Knowledge Management. This has lead to the creation of two papers in academic publications that are true collaborations between AKRI and actual innovative business practitioners, not researchers.
In more recent years the development of the ideas surrounding the Knowledge Structure Map and an associated methodology for business application have matured into a system that has been tried successfully in many large and small companies and in a range of knowledge sectors. This idea has been internalised by Rolls-Royce plc and its use is growing through its popularity and an increasingly vigorous training programme for Rolls-Royce staff.