The purpose of knowledge management is the systematic control of knowledge, an increasingly important company resource. It encompasses development, monitoring, support, and improvement of strategies, processes, organizational structures, and technologies for effective knowledge processing within a company. This includes all activities relating to acquisition, preparation, transmission, and utilization of knowledge. These knowledge management activities generally do not occur in isolation; they occur primarily in the operational and scheduling business processes of the company. Hence, an integrated view of business processes, knowledge processing, organizational structures, information systems, etc. is needed.

Most of these aspects can be depicted using established ARIS methods (e.g., EPCs, organizational charts, function allocation diagrams, eERMs, etc.). However, accurate representation, analysis, and improvement of knowledge processing requires additional means of representation to identify and structure the content of relevant knowledge categories, to describe the distribution of knowledge within an organization, and to model knowledge creation and utilization in business processes.

For this reason, two new object types, Knowledge category and Documented knowledge, and two new model types, Knowledge structure diagram and Knowledge map, have been added. Furthermore, existing model types used for the representation of business processes (EPC, PCD, Office process, etc.) were extended to include constructs for handling knowledge creation and utilization. The new object and model types are methodically integrated into the main model types of the requirements definition (e.g., eERM, organizational chart, function tree), thus ensuring an integrated perspective. For example, this would enable models from a business process optimization project to be used for the purpose of analyzing and improving knowledge processing.

The knowledge structure diagram is located in the data view of the requirements definition. The knowledge map, like the extended model types for business process modeling, belongs to the control view of the requirements definition.