Knowledge Management and Axiomatic Design

It is postulated that the value-adding intellectual activity in an enterprise can be formulated as an engineering design problem, using axiomatic design. Axiomatic design formulates a decomposition structure that includes four domains: customer, functional, physical, and process. Knowledge exists within the entities in domains and in the relation between the entities in adjacent domains. Once an entity has been identified in one domain, a properly designed knowledge management system can suggest all the known solutions in the adjacent domains, and the interactions between the domains, along with details about how well these solutions work.