Chapter 13: Knowledge Management

Title: Capturing a key relationships over the product lifecycle: an e-mail approach

Author(s): Craig Loftus, Ben Hicks, Christopher McMahon

Address: University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK | University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK | University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2009 pp. 624 - 634

Abstract/Summary: It is widely acknowledged that engineers communicate extensively with colleagues as part of their information seeking practices. Despite this, even the most advanced PLM systems lack the ability to automatically capture the key relationships and stakeholders within a project - unless known a priori. Reasons for this include the highly distributed and long-life nature of today's engineering teams combined with the multitude of communication mechanisms. The significant relationships in a project can thus vary dramatically over the product lifecycle and over different phases of the product lifecycle. It is proposed that a means to address this is to elicit key relationships and individuals from e-mail records. In order to explore this approach a method of relationship modelling is presented and applied to an e-mail corpus from a large systems engineering project. The ability of the approach to identify the key relationships and stakeholders is tested and the implications for improving information access over the product lifecycle are discussed.

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