A framework for the integration of knowledge management and business process management

Knowledge management (KM) has been considered as a new corporate information system paradigm for knowledge-intensive enterprises of the information age. Its acceptance by the corporate world, however, is below expectation. Recently, several attempts have been made to combine KM with business process management (BPM) that is a new approach to effectively managing business processes as corporate assets. Clear descriptions about their interrelationship or a comprehensive framework to combine them, however, has not been provided. This paper explores how KM and BPM can complement each other and proposes a framework to integrate the two paradigms. The paper classifies process knowledge into three types and suggests how they can extend the functionalities of existing knowledge management systems and business process management systems by considering the lifecycle requirements of both knowledge and business processes. The framework and extended functionalities can provide a new corporate paradigm that combines the advantages of KM and BPM. Further, important corporate knowledge about business processes can be defined and managed in a single framework.