Exploring Support for Knowledge Utilisation: Decision Making in Complex Interdisciplinary Engineering Systems
The objective of this thesis is to gain an improved understanding of information use in complex interdisciplinary environments and to explore key drivers defining behaviours and needs. Following this, a set of requirements are developed to create improved support for engineers during the design process. The methodology uses interviews, observations and shadowing to investigate three industrial UK based organisations. A survey of over 170 individuals with different engineering backgrounds was then used to explore the case study findings further. This research has found that many engineers have been with their organisation for decades accruing specific knowledge. Many of these engineers are nearing retirement and the resulting knowledge loss is predicted to be highly detrimental, especially for innovation in organisations that use adaptive designs that have a high level of complexity. Many managers are concerned about the future impact. Documentation and digital resources are used as a primary coping mechanism. Although engineers recognise the considerable benefits from improving interaction with these materials, many find participation problematic. Documentation is not easy to create, takes a long time to find and it can be hard to comprehend due to lack of context. Engineers are spending many hours a day just to find information, which is accompanied by a high level of frustration. Furthermore, documentation tends to only record formal materials and not support ideation, rationale, learning or deliberation. Digital support tools are failing to meet engineers' needs. Presently these issues are prohibitive and participation in knowledge reuse through documentation is perceived as not worthwhile. Deadline pressures, poor user interfaces and unstable file systems worsen these problems. These issues will certainly become more severe as the amount of information being produced continues to increase. The research uses these findings to present the requirements for improved support, followed by the presentation of a software system. The system passively collects activity data, stores it chronologically, and visualises it for better interaction. The captured materials are mined to help structure the materials. A key feature is automatic recommendation of relevant materials based on the activity captured by the engineer to cut down on search time. It is designed to accommodate working styles and consolidate existing functions into a single space where documentation, digital communication and file storage exist in one shared time-line which helps capture context, aiding fast comprehension.
Engineering design, knowledge management, Engineering
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