AVKMT 2023

Goal of the workshop:

The workshop aims to foster cooperation among software practitioners and researchers of e.g., software engineering, industrial engineering, management, and design science to exchange the latest experience and research ideas on software engineering-driven tool support, specifically in order to enhance the transparency and alignment of knowledge across disciplines in organizations through the design, production and adoption of next generation visual tools.

Workshop theme:

Advanced visual knowledge management tools are a very attractive field for innovative interdisciplinary research. Organizations and thus practitioners face an increasing pressure to constantly adapt to new market trends, technologies and competition due to the VUCA¹ impact on any aspect of business and IT. To respond to these changes, organizations need to increase their agility and dynamic capabilities. This requires increased collaboration across disciplines to achieve global transparency and to enable aligned decision making. The management and industrial engineering disciplines increasingly adopt canvases² in brainstorming sessions as they help to visualize concisely complex contexts, fostering a common understanding. Design science research further investigates design methods of visual inquiry tools/canvases to allow for new methodologically sound canvases covering all relevant areas in need of collaboration within and across knowledge domains. While software developers are meanwhile used to visual technical models like, e.g., UML diagrams, engineers, management, communication and other domain experts are not. However, simpler and targeted visual tools are emerging as the way to go to better and more efficiently support intuition and cross-domain understanding. This tool support allows for decreased complexity, increased transparency and a new level of alignment and decision making. To make this possible, new techniques and methodologies are needed to be able to build better, more robust and more trusted systems for interdisciplinary collaboration. Here, aspects like guidance, safety/security, GDPR and user-friendliness need to be considered and integrated in the whole design process from the beginning.

Scope of the workshop:

Researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry, working in the areas of software engineering, process engineering, (knowledge) management, industrial engineering and design science are invited to discuss state of the art solutions, novel issues, ideas, recent developments, applications, methodologies, techniques, experience reports, and tools for the design, development, validation and use of visual knowledge management tools. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Advanced tool support for decision making
• Visual tools for knowledge representation and management
• Dependency management, hierarchization and integration in visual tools
• Software tools and platforms for knowledge integration and management
• Knowledge alignment and its integration in the business processes
• Sociotechnical design for interdisciplinary collaboration
• Transdisciplinary requirements for tool-supported alignment
• Cross-organizational and cross-team IT collaboration
• Towards the digital transformation of collaboration
• Barriers to adoption

¹Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
²A very popular and widely used canvas is the Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder (2008).