Autopoietic Knowledge Management Systems

Abstract

Knowledge management in an organisation is a key activity that aims to improve the organisation's competitiveness through gathering, processing, storing, and sharing of organisational knowledge. Socio-technical solutions designed to support knowledge management are systems for managing knowledge in an organisation. IT systems can support employees in their knowledge processes as well as independently generate, process, and codify knowledge, thus supporting the processes of organisational learning and development of knowledge bases. The cyclical and recurrent character of activities, both in terms of the interactions between process participants in organisations and actions of IT systems themselves, can be perceived in terms of autopoiesis, which explains the significance of knowledge management systems in organisational knowledge processing. The aim of this chapter is to analyse a knowledge management system through the lens of autopoietic perception of the activities taking place in an organisation, which are performed in poietic space.