Background to the research project

In the course of digitalization, the world of work is undergoing change. The current changes do not only lead to an integration of new technologies and tools into digitalized production processes. Rather, users and information systems must be able to deal with constantly growing volumes of data and information. This raises the question of how an organization intends to deal with these volumes of information in the long term. Willful, controlled forgetting thus becomes the functional counterpart of data collection and learning. The research project cyber-physical Forgetting in socio-digital systems conducted at the Chair of Information Systems, Processes and Systems represents the second phase of the Priority Program SPP 1921 and follows the past research project Intentional Forgetting in Organizations.

Research Goal

The goal of the research project is to make the mechanisms of human forgetting usable for a technical-organizational context. To this end, new methods and transmission paths for organizations are to be developed on an interdisciplinary basis in order to find a balance between constantly growing amounts of stored information and information reduction through forgetting. It is to be investigated how cyber-physical systems (CPS) can forget, how actors experience dealing with forgetting CPS, and to what extent collaboration with a forgetting CPS can promote intentional forgetting in manufacturing routines. Intentional forgetting will also be compared in continuous change processes with that in episodic change processes (Manuthetics research project) and modeled in business processes.

Research questions

The concrete research questions of the project explore how self-organizing "forgetting" man-machine systems look like, in which way processes and structures are designed with forgetting information systems and which chances and risks an established forgetting mechanism within information systems offers for administration and industry. In addition, the actual impact of forgetting processes in socio-digital systems of factory and administration will be investigated. Central questions are, for example, how the targeted forgetting of knowledge can be used in the synthesis of new solutions in development processes and to what extent forgetting leads to better adaptation in volatile environments.

Further development of the KMDL®

The Knowledge Modeling and Description Language (KMDL) was developed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Gronau and colleagues to represent knowledge conversions along business processes. It models information and knowledge flows that take place between a company and its internal and external business partners. However, since previous methods of modeling knowledge-intensive business processes do not offer the possibility to represent forgetting, the KMDL® will be extended by a modeling approach for forgetting in business processes within the scope of this research project. A deeper view will be created, which describes the knowledge networks of a person in more detail. It will thus be possible to identify different forms of forgetting on the person level. Analogous to the person view, a CPS view will be developed, in which concrete processes of learning and forgetting will be taken into account. As a semiformal, graph-based modeling language, KMDL® is used in research and practice and can identify significant improvement potentials for the prevailing knowledge management through its description of knowledge transformations in the operational environment.

Project partners, funding and data

The DFG-funded research project "cyber-physical Forgetting in socio-digital systems" is a subproject of the DFG Priority Program SPP1921 Intentional Forgetting in Organizations. The Chair of Business Informatics Processes and Systems works as a project team together with the Chair of Business Psychology at the Ruhr University Bochum.
Funding: 2020 - 2023

Contact Person: Christof Thim 
Website: http://www.spp1921.de