An object-oriented development method for Customer Knowledge Management Information Systems

Abstract

For the advances of Internet technologies in recent years, electronic commerce (EC) has gained many attentions as a major theme for enterprises to keep their competitiveness. Among all possible endeavors for the EC, research has shown that effective management of customer relationships by taking advantage of customer knowledges is a major source for keeping competitive differentiation. Therefore, it is commonly recognized as an important goal for an enterprise to promote its managerial effectiveness on customer relationships through a prospective customer knowledge-based information system to achieve the so-called Customer-Oriented EC. In this paper, we present an object-oriented method for the development of such a Customer Knowledge Management Information System (CKMIS). The method starts from the identification of customers and their desired knowledge-accessed behaviors, through the recognition of a system architecture that supports the identification and realization of these behaviors, and finally ends with the analysis and design of the architectural classes/objects that collaborate to identify and realize these behaviors. The method is use case driven with UML notations utilized and extended as its modeling tool. To illustrate, the method is applied to an exemplified CKMIS for a book publishing company.