Software Agent Societies for Process Management in Knowledge-Based Organization

• Published in: European Conference on Knowledge Management p. 661
• Main Authors: Soltysik-Piorunkiewicz, Anna, Zytniewski, Mariusz
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Kidmore End Academic Conferences International Limited 01.09.2013
• Subjects: Alliances; Communication; Competitive advantage; Corporate culture; Decision making; Design; Influence; Information systems; Intelligent agents; Knowledge economy; Knowledge management; Ontology; Semantics; Society; Software
• ISSN: 2048-8963; 2048-8971

The dynamics of changes in an organization's environment and the increasing competitiveness of the global knowledge-based economy compel business companies to use their resources efficiently and effectively. Business management theory offers the process-centric approach founded on a systemic perspective of the organizational structure. Within management science, the process-centered approach (which support knowledge productivity and which facilitate innovation) originates in relates to a shift in the way we perceive the organizational structure, i.e. a move away from a vertical, linear, functional perspective toward a horizontal, process-centric one. Agent technologies may, in this context, constitute an element of the organizational information or knowledge system, where software agents support selected tasks within the framework of a specific business process. On the other hand, in the case of multi-agent systems, the process-centered approach comes to be applied in defining the system architecture. The use of software agents will make it easier to integrate distributed devices within business processes in which a human being participates, dynamically specify business processes with the participation of such devices and codify such processes as part of the concept of composite software, and consequently gain a competitive advantage by knowledge-based organizations thanks to the possibility of gaining new knowledge about processes and entities that take part in them. The use of semantic solutions in this process will aid the representation of knowledge gained in this way and its processing by IT technologies and by a human being. This way of codifying knowledge about dynamic business processes and entities that participate in them makes it possible to use agent societies also for the purpose of managing the knowledge that was obtained in this way. This paper is dedicated to a range of issues concerning the process-centric approach and software agent technologies to support organizations during the knowledge-based economy.