Knowledge Management in the Industrial Field: from Corporate Intranet to Digital Companions

This keynote speech is a journey through more than 20 years of knowledge management experience in a large industrial conglomerate like Siemens. The journey covers some milestones like Wikisphere and TechnoWeb in more detail and describes the ups and downs in corporate KM. In addition, the shift in supporting technologies over the two decades will be shown. Finally, in a retrospective analysis some reasons for what happened why are discussed.

Dr.-Ing. Manfred Langen has been responsible for Knowledge Management topics in Siemens Corporate Research and Technology since 1996. In 1997 he was a co-founder of the Siemens Corporate Knowledge Management (CKM) Network, the expert community for corporate KM. With the Knowledge Management Maturity Model (KMMM®) he invented one of the first available assessments in that area. As director he coordinated a research program including collaboration, information structuring, semantic search and social software. As a Principal Key Expert he guided the development of Siemens social software applications like Blogosphere, Wikisphere and TechnoWeb. In addition, Dr. Langen was representative for Siemens in the KM (now AI) committee in BITKOM (German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media) and member of the program committee of the yearly KnowTech conference (until 2015). Today he guides Siemens in new forms of digital collaboration like digital companions. Dr. Langen published more than 50 conference papers and holds several patents.