A Strategy for Artefact-Based Information Navigation in Large Engineering Organisations

Central to an effective information management or knowledge management strategy - particularly where the KM strategy focuses on the capture and codification of knowledge - is the ability to efficiently and effectively access information. This includes finding and re-finding the right information in the right amount at the right time. For many large organisations, and in particular engineering organisations that design, build and service a wide range of complex long-life products, the volume of information (knowledge) that is captured and stored, and the variety of users and their information needs make the provision of appropriate information access tools a major challenge. By way of an alternate to extant text-based tools, the work reported in this paper explores the concept of artefact-based information search within the context of large engineering organisations.