- Experience is knowledge that is proven in practice and context-dependent.
- Experience Management refers to a systematic handling of experiences.
- An Experience-based Information System is the software system that supports Experience Management.
Need for steps towards CMM Level 5, Six Sigma, etc.: All these improvement approaches have the goals of better understanding, stabilizing, standardizing, and optimizing processes and decisions in order to achieve a better and more repeatable product quality. Standardizing processes using Experience Management also allows a further process optimization, e.g., by automation at a more fine-grained level, for production lines as well as for business processes.
One major prerequisite is to focus on and select appropriate goals, subject areas, and scenarios with a significant/reasonable impact on the organization's business goals. This is assured by using proper engineering methods like the DISER/DILLEBIS method for designing and implementing experience management systems (see paper "Systematic Population, Utilization, and Maintenance of a Repository for Comprehensive Reuse" [2000], dissertation of C. Tautz [2001], and my dissertation [2005]).
Another major prerequisite -according to recent surveys of KPMG, Delphi, and Fraunhofer- is a tight integration of experience management processes and tools/components into surrounding processes and supporting tools. This is addressed by my vision of Ambient Experience Management with my Experience Feedback Loop.
Markus Nick & Klaus-Dieter Althoff]
The relatively new field of Experience Management (EM) focuses, in particular, on exemplary knowledge (e.g., in the form of cases) and also looks at the methods and technologies that are suitable for that. Thus, EM is a special form of knowledge management. In general, knowledge management deals with the activities regarding collection from different sources (documents, data, experts, etc.), structuring, documenting, refinement/improvement, evaluation, and distribution of knowledge and its objectives.
The main focus of EM is on the development, operation, maintenance, evaluation, and integration of Experience-based Information Systems (EbIS), that is information systems that contain exemplary knowledge, support EM and all the necessary processes.
The "ingredients" for EM/EbIS come from various areas such as Experience Factory (e.g., with regard to embedding an EbIS into the knowledge-relevant processes in a company), ontologies (e.g., as a basis for the domain model respectively vocabulary), data mining and text mining (e.g., on the analysis of existing data and documents), as well as - particularly - Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). It has been shown that CBR is suitable as a principle and methodology for EM, and a technology for supporting EbIS.
