Building models of product development processes: An integrative approach to managing organizational knowledge

Abstract

The process for designing and developing complex system products-all of the activities performed and the information and other work products produced-is essential to innovative and competitive enterprises. This process is dynamic, complex, and complicated, and the people who understand it best are in short supply and may not be around for the next project. For a variety of reasons, models of this process are important to systems engineers and managers. A 2006 paper in this journal discussed key concepts in modeling product development (PD) processes. This paper follows by presenting a general approach to building PD process models, integrative process modeling (IPM), which support a wide variety of purposes, such as providing evidence for external certifications, planning projects and programs, and more-but especially serving as a salient repository for crucial organizational information. Although a centralized team of modeling experts leads the overall IPM endeavor, distributed agents define various processes and activities, thereby capturing PD information across very large organizations. The paper discusses management of the model-building project and subsequent operations, as well as software tool support and model storage. A collection of helpful heuristics guides IPM to help organizations improve the long-term value provided by PD process modeling.

What Do We Know About Knowledge Integration: Fusing Micro- and Macro-Organizational Perspectives

“…A large body of research on cross-functional teams exists (Clark & Fujimoto, 1991;Browning, 2018;Kim, 1997). Its contribution lies mainly in its explicit recognition of the need for formal planning and design of these teams in order to achieve and reap the benefits of knowledge integration (Browning, 2018).…”

“…A large body of research on cross-functional teams exists (Clark & Fujimoto, 1991;Browning, 2018;Kim, 1997). Its contribution lies mainly in its explicit recognition of the need for formal planning and design of these teams in order to achieve and reap the benefits of knowledge integration (Browning, 2018). Researchers studying these issues have also addressed the organizational designs associated with the management and effective placement of these teams within the firm's formal structure (Majchrzak, More & Faraj, 2012).…”

“…Understandably, researchers advancing this perspective take a broad view of the types of knowledge being integrated. In particular, they note the importance of integrating external knowledge (Zahra & George, 2000a;Zahra & Nielsen, 2002), as well as the knowledge that resides in different organizational units or functions across the firm, such as marketing and manufacturing (e.g., Browning, 2018;Kim, 1997), and across different levels of the organization (Grant, 1996a).…”

Modeling and structuring design rationale to enable knowledge reuse

“…The first conclusion is that none of the models in the literature seems to uncover the intricacies of the system from which a failure description should be developed. Browning (p73) state, “no one person knows everything about all of the work (and even if they did, could not efficiently do or document all of it), it is important to capture and integrate the `system‐level’ knowledge.” We proposed a model that integrated three views: View I ‐ system hierarchy, View II ‐ a causal chain of failure events, and View III ‐ causality models of normal, failure, and recovered states for a particular event in View II and the corresponding subsystem in View I.…”

“…“Model is an abstract representation of reality—built, verified, analyzed, and manipulated for a particular purpose.” (p71) A model that is applicable to all systems and situations that concern these becomes an explicit conceptualization, an ontology of the universe. We aim to propose an ontology for failures in real systems that were conceptualized, engineered, and tested to behave in a particular manner in a given physical space in order to fulfil a purpose.…”