1. LECTURE 8 Amare Michael Desta
Decision Support & Executive Information Systems:
LECTURE 8 Amare Michael Desta

2. Managing knowledge in knowledge work: How operations are organized in “traditional” work e.g. in manufacturing sector
Different operations follow each others in logical order until the task is completed

3. Managing knowledge in knowledge work - (Contd….)
Could the same happen in knowledge
work or is it “chaotic” or less
organized by its nature?
What is the difference between the logistics of
physical components
information / knowledge components?

4. Knowledge flow (logistic) and utilization of knowledge resources
Available explicit
knowledge resources
transfer media
Available tacit
transfer media
Unavailable explicit
knowledge resources
Unavailable tacit
Knowledge outcomes
-embrained knowledge
-embodied knowledge
-encultured knowledge
-embedded knowledge
-encoded knowledge
Knowledge acquisition
-defining the requirements
-localizing knowledge
-accessing knowledge
-absorptive capacity
Knowledge creation & reuse
-skills & competencies
-tools & methods

5. Knowledge Management, (KM) - the need and the reality
The move from an industrially-based economy to a knowledge or information-based one in the 21st Century demands a top-notch KM System to secure a competitive edge and a capacity for learning.
Currently, governments around the world, multinational corporations, and a multitude of companies are interested, even concerned with the concept of knowledge management. Indeed, even individual Canadian provinces have an interest in understanding the flow of knowledge within their confines, trying to become more aware of the structures that exist within their hierarchies. For example, "Prince Edward Island has agreed to become the first world test site for KAM, a new 'Knowledge Assessment Methodology' devised by the U.S. National Research Council in Washington, and coordinated by the Institute of Island Studies. The KAM will assess the capacity of Prince Edward Island to compete to world standards in what pundits have dubbed 'The Knowledge Economy'. As computers shrink our world, distance begins to disappear; the distinction between center and periphery narrows to insignificance. For Prince Edward Island, where small population and a paucity of natural resources have traditionally been economic inhibitors, the Knowledge Economy provides the potential for significant, environmentally benign economic growth." To understand more about the whys of measuring the flow of knowledge in any institution, one must understand more about knowledge.
The real change has come from the necessity for less information and more knowledge. There has been a shift from information to knowledge.
Shift from bureaucracies to networks. The traditional hierarchical designs that served the industrial era are not flexible enough to harness an organization's full intellectual capability.
Shift from training/development to learning. The role of education has become paramount in all organizations, public and private.
Shift from local/national to transnational. Organizations can no longer rely purely upon national approaches to maintain their profitable growth. More and more, companies and industries of all types must globalize in order to maximize their profits.

6. Knowledge Management – the importance
The new source of wealth is K, and not labor, land, or financial capital. It is the intangible, intellectual assets that must be managed.
The key challenge of the Knowledge -based economy is to foster innovation

7. The Knowledge Economy But do you all agree?
For several decades the world's best-known
forecasters of societal change have predicted
the emergence of a new economy in which
brainpower, not machine power, is the critical
resource.
But the future has already turned into the
present, and the era of K has arrived.
"The Learning Organization," Economist Intelligence Unit”
But do you all agree?
Thomas Stewart, Board of Editors of Fortune:
"1991 was the crossover year when capital spending by U.S. companies was greater on telecommunications, copying and computer equipment than on industrial, construction, mining, and farming equipment. We tend to think of the mid-1990s as the transition point, but we actually made this shift, from a macroeconomic perspective, around "

8. The Knowledge Economy – rest on THREE pillars
The role that K plays in transactions: it is what is being bought and sold; both the raw material and the finished goods
The concurrent rise in importance of K assets, which transform and add value to knowledge products
The emergence of ways to manage these materials and assets, or KM

9. Two Kinds of Knowledge
K is intangible, dynamic, & difficult to measure,
BUT without it no organization can survive.
Tacit: or unarticulated K is more personal, experiential, context specific, and hard to formalize; is difficult to communicate or share with others; and is generally embedded in the heads of individuals and teams.
Explicit: K can easily be written down and codified.
How can we transfer tacit knowledge? Through mechanisms of socialization, mentorships, apprenticeships, face-to-face communication. Since knowledge may be an organization's only sustainable competitive advantage, it is very important to capture tacit knowledge. Intranets and help knowledge flow through an organization. Tacit knowledge often moves laterally through informal channels of communication (communities of practice). For example, those groups that hang around the coffee pot or the coffee machine -- they are exchanging knowledge, just as the smokers huddled near the entrance to the building at break time. The information that is passed in this way is very important because it is useful for helping people to get their work done more effectively, in part, because nobody is willing to question or think about it very much. Communities of practice must have their place in a comprehensive knowledge management effort.
There are two kinds of knowledge: tacit, which is hard to articulate, versus explicit knowledge, which can be written down and codified.
Keep in mind that flows of knowledge are an organization's capacity to learn. They are all you really have.

10. The main issues are – how to
Design and install techniques and processes to create, protect, and use known K.
Design and create environments and activities to discover and release K that is not known, or tacit K.
Articulate the purpose and nature of managing K as a resource & embodying it in other initiatives and programs.
An accepted definition of knowledge management does not yet exist, although perspectives on knowledge abound, but there are three important points to keep in mind:
1. Knowledge today is a necessary and sustainable source of competitive advantage. In an era characterized by rapid change and uncertainty, it is claimed that successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it through the organization, and embody it in technologies, products, and services.' Indeed, several sectors - for example, the financial services, consulting, and software industries -- depend on knowledge as their principal way to create value. Thus knowledge is displacing capital, natural resources, and labor as the basic economic resource. Governments know this all too well.
2. There is general recognition that companies are not good at managing knowledge. They may undervalue the creation and capture of knowledge, they may lose or give away what they possess, they may deter or inhibit knowledge sharing, and they may underinvest in both using and reusing the knowledge they have. Above all, they often do not know what they know. This is probably true of explicit or articulated knowledge: that which can be expressed in words and numbers and can be easily communicated and shared in hard form, as scientific formulas, codified procedures, or universal principles. It is undoubtedly true of tacit or unarticulated knowledge: that which is more personal, experiential, context specific, and hard to formalize; is difficult to communicate or share with others; and is generally in the heads of individuals and teams.
3. Recognizing the potential of knowledge in value creation and the failure to fully exploit it, some corporations have embarked on knowledge management programs. These are explicit attempts to manage knowledge as a resource, in particular:
Designing and installing techniques and processes to create, protect, and use known knowledge.
Designing and creating environments and activities to discover and release knowledge that is not known.
Articulating the purpose and nature of managing knowledge as a resource and embodying it in other initiatives and programs.

11. Do we really need KM System?
Competitive success will be based on how strategically intellectual capital is managed
Capturing the knowledge residing in the minds of employees so that it can be easily shared across the enterprise
Leveraging organizational knowledge is emerging as the solution to an increasingly fragmented and globally-dispersed workplace
Increasingly, senior executives are recognizing that knowledge and learning represent the preeminent source of sustainable advantage in a fast-moving, highly competitive world. They know it is no longer enough to leave critical knowledge sitting passively in the minds of individual employees. Workforce mobility, falling educational standards, and the rapid rate of business change mean that individuals can no longer be relied upon to provide consistent, comprehensive insight. Instead, the knowledge trapped within the employee base must be leveraged to the organizational level, where it can be accessed, synthesized, augmented, and deployed for the benefit of all. Organizations and individuals must learn rapidly and uniformly across different functions and levels of the organization. Yesterday's informal or tacit knowledge management techniques the desktop, the hallway conversation, the memo, the trade show-are no longer sufficient in a period of radical change.
The best reason for an organization to develop a knowledge management system is to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace: by turning intellectual assets into value through innovation. The real differentiator for those leading companies is knowing how to use innovation to create value and ongoing growth.

12. Do we really need KM System? (Contd…)
Instead of constantly reengineering and downsizing: talented people are assets to be developed for a global 21st Century
The reuse of knowledge saves work, reduces communications costs, and allows a company to take on more projects.
Knowledge Grid: “what we know we know; what we know we don't know; what we don't know we know; and what we don't know we don't know.”
What is needed is a similar mindset about the collection of intellectual assets; it belongs to everyone employed in a particular place, and it has to be shared. You can't share knowledge without trust and honesty and openness. So if knowledge is the fundamental asset, then the culture has to reflect that. What is needed is a knowledge culture, one that values knowledge, values it above rank and title. And knowledge cultures are those in which formal attention is paid to what some academics have called the "knowledge grid." It has four categories: What we know we know. What we know we don't know. What we don't know we know. And what we don't know we don't know.
Partly as a reaction to downsizing, some organizations are now trying to use technology to capture the knowledge residing in the minds of their employees so it can be easily shared across the enterprise. No longer should companies have to worry that employees will walk out the door with valuable knowledge that it no longer has access to. Although many individuals may come and go, their learning is embedded for future use. Leveraging organizational knowledge is emerging as the solution to an increasingly fragmented and globally dispersed workplace. For many of these companies, knowledge management has become the next silver bullet-in effect, the successor to the reengineering and downsizing efforts that marked the last decade.

13. The Successful Managing of Knowledge
Focus on FIVE tasks:
Generating knowledge
Accessing knowledge
Representing and embedding knowledge
Facilitating knowledge
Transferring knowledge
It is a process of instilling the culture and
helping the people in it find ways to share and
utilize their collective knowledge.

14. KM – the enablers Leadership Knowledge champions, such as CKOs Culture
Access
Technology
Learning Culture
Leadership: it is absolutely critical to liberate the creativity of teams, and yet not have chaos. In a sustainable knowledge managed learning organization, leadership is often expressed as the self-confidence to navigate the unknown waters of the future.
Organizational Requirements for leveraging intellectual capital requires attention to what have been recognized as "knowledge enablers," i.e., structures and attributes that must be in place for a successful knowledge management program.
Access - Making sure available knowledge provides value and is not stored "just in case." The challenges are to facilitate access to the right content at the right time and place, be content rich and navigation lean, manage regulations and copyrights, and provide flexibility and ease of access.
Technology - Deploying computing tools that link people enterprise-wide; support collaboration, including navigation and search engines and data storage technologies; and link people to the global resources of the organization.
Embedding a learning attitude and placing value on competency development. Historically, more training expenditures have gone to developing cognitive skills than to developing motivated creativity. Those days are gone now. Currently, the goal is to see intelligent people using innovation to create knowledge out of information. To do so, there needs to be a corresponding culture: valuing organizational behaviors and attitudes that support an environment of trust and collaboration.
The workplace culture is paramount because while management may pay lip service to the value of cooperation and its ability to facilitate organizational knowledge, there is an underlying belief that performance is really driven by "corporate stars" and that internal competition must be in place to attract these superstars since only under-performers can be found in cooperative, team-oriented workplaces. Knowledge tools, controls, and new organizational structures will go far to create a new culture in which informed decision making is valued, but explicit efforts to cultivate that culture are still needed. Knowledge and skills can never substitute for the motivation only an effective organizational culture can provide.
Knowledge management programs need all enabling factors, and not just one or two, if there is to be any real success.

15. More on the importance of Corporate Culture
Changing the culture is imperative.
To create a climate in which employees volunteer their creativity and expertise, managers need to look beyond the traditional tools at their disposal: finding ways to build trust and develop fair process.
That means getting the gatekeepers to facilitate the flow of information rather than hoard it.
And offering rewards and incentives
The elements of fair process are simple: 1. Engage people's input in decisions that directly affect them. 2. Explain why decisions are made the way they are. 3. Make clear what will be expected of employees after the changes are made. Fair process may sound like a soft issue, but it is crucial to building trust and unlocking ideas.
Adds Buckman Laboratories' Koskiniemi: "Successful knowledge sharing is 90 percent cultural, 5 percent tools and 5 percent magic. All the technology and tools in the world won't make you a knowledge-based organization if you do not establish a culture that believes in sharing."
Organizations must offer a high level of psychological safety and capacity for openness.
Rewards and incentives signal what behaviors and outcomes are most valued by management. It should not be surprising that knowledge accumulation and sharing are not valued. Management sends strong signals through its compensation policies; different roles are perceived of value according to their allocated compensation. So be careful sending mixed signals. But culture is more than just compensation, and it is responsive to influences other than paychecks. Management sends signals about what is important through its recruiting priorities, promotions, and, possibly more than anything, through its own behavior. These deeply embedded cultural assumptions are significant.
To encourage knowledge sharing, some companies are creating central knowledge repositories.

16. The technological divide
Generating organizational K invariably means converting the tacit K of the individual into explicit K accessible by all.
IT is most effective when it enables this
social process.
Organizations must think through their technological systems.
Technology such as Intranets and advanced collaborative software have made KM possible.
Knowledge resides primarily in people whose experience, insights, skills, and competencies are the organization's most valuable resource. So, knowledge is a higher order commodity than technology, which simply provides tools to help the employees and the organization to develop and apply its management capital.
"Technology allows people to collect, find, filter and distribute information far more rapidly than ever before. It is now possible to move large volumes of information quickly, and institutionalize what has always been an informal and haphazard process," explains Arthur Andersen's Michael Stone.

17. Organizational Changes
Lines between departments and operating divisions blur
KM even completely collapses boundaries
A KM system cannot work through hierarchies
Individual and team learning process must become the true driver of organizational learning
Not surprisingly, KM blurs the line between departments and operating divisions. Managers traditionally have kept a tight leash on their own department's data, and they've frequently interpreted it in narrow, rigid ways. Knowledge management collapses the boundaries. It allows people to use information across applications. In order to justify financial investments in technology, CKOs must understand organization structure, motivation of people, and crossboundary processes. Since it is a bottom-up and peer-to-peer tool that seeds an organization with intellectual capital, it is foreign ground for most organizations.
Do not isolate Knowledge Management: some CEOs have put knowledge management at the top of their agendas. Others have not given it the same attention as they have given cost cutting, restructuring, or international expansion. In companies where that is the case, knowledge management takes place - if at all - in functional departments such as HR or IT. But companies that isolate knowledge management risk losing its benefits, which are highest when it is coordinated with HR, IT, and competitive strategy.
I think the most interesting representation of what is going on in business is the quote from Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future:
"It is hardly news that the corporation as we know it is headed for the scrap heap of business history. Internal corporate structures are already mutating beyond recognition. Corporate boundaries are dissolving into commercial irrelevance as businesses explore entirely new modes of association and interaction."
While corporate directives to share information and create cross-functional teams can improve knowledge management efforts, real innovation and self directed learning can happen only at the individual and team level.
It's also a bottom-up and peer-to-peer tool that seeds an organization with intellectual capital, and this is foreign ground for most organizations. A knowledge management system cannot work through hierarchies. So the cultural side of it is very interesting, and means that while knowledge management doesn't have to be driven from the top, it does very much have to originate from the top.

18. Organizational Knowledge - Why is it Important?
Knowledge can be embedded in processes, products, systems, and controls
Knowledge can be accessed as it is needed from sources inside or outside the firm
It is versatile and can be transferred formally, through training, or informally, by way of workplace socialization
It is the essence of the competitive edge!
Organizational Knowledge: Why Is It Important?
Because it makes money. And that is why it is important to have the knowledge process facilitated by a steady development of a knowledge culture, based on incentives, strong management leadership, that values, shares, and uses knowledge.

19. Why KM? What’s the big deal?
By instituting a learning organization (KM-intensive), there is an increase in employee satisfaction due to greater personal development and empowerment.
Keep your employees longer and thereby, reduce the loss of intellectual capital from people leaving the company.
Save money by not reinventing the wheel for each new project

20. Why KM? What’s the big deal? (Contd….)
Reduce costs by decreasing and achieving economies of scale in obtaining information from external providers.
Increase productivity by making K available more quickly and easily.
Provides workers with a more democratic place to work by allowing everyone access to K

21. Why KM? What’s the big deal? (Contd….)
Learning Faster With KM
Learning fast to stay competitive
KM software and technological infrastructures allow for global access to an organization’s K, at a keystroke
It is obvious that there is a significant tie between knowledge management systems and a workplace dedicated to learning. All organizations learn, but some are faster and more effective learners. The key is to see learning as inseparable from everyday work. Training, by contrast, is typically episodic and detached from the context in which results are produced. This is especially important in Canada's case because it is moving from largely a natural resources-based economy to one in which knowledge will be expected to keep it competitive in the world's marketplace. To stay competitive, it will have to learn FAST.

22. Successful KM programs – the indications
Information is widely disseminated throughout the organization
Accessible at a fast rate of speed.
Virtual communities of practice share what is known in a global fashion, independent of time zones and other geographic limitations.
Business without boundaries broad, often virtual in nature.
Collaboration to support continuous innovation and new K creation.

23. KM and future scenarios
Where are we going? What are we here for?
People need awareness of the whole: in what direction is the organization going?
To have a goal to reach in the future can provide great incentive for a KM initiative.
Effective leveraging lies within an organization’s capacity for rethinking and recreating. Scenario thinking can help us see the blind spots, and help us create the future we want!!!
One of the major problems with governments, corporations, companies, organizations, and private citizens is that they have no concept of the future and never think about ramifications? Future studies must be figured into an organization's overall knowledge management system because to sustain a commitment over the course of months and years, people need to have awareness of the whole and understand the direction an organization is going. The challenge of organizational strategy and purpose is to revitalize and rethink the organization's business focus, and figure out where it is heading. To expect ongoing knowledge creation, it must have some relevance to the future you are creating. Therefore, a future element must be ever-present. If you can only offer the wholesale version with precautions thrown in, it is better than the present reality. Future scenarios should not only be for the haves.
Knowledge Management must somehow be connected to future studies for at least one significant reason and that is because to have a knowledge management system, it presupposes the ongoing creation of new knowledge. The challenge of organizational strategy and purpose is to revitalize and rethink the organization's business focus, and figure out where it is heading. Peter Drucker's Theory of Business can also be brought into this analysis because he believed that there must be significant focus put on defining the environment, mission, and core competencies needed to accomplish that mission. "If the attitudes brought forth are genuinely heartfelt, if managers and especially top managers can increase their vulnerability by exposing their own deepest aspirations and assumptions, if people can feel part of a larger creative process shaping their industry and society, and if all this can be tied to people's commitment to creating a future about which they deeply care - then intellect and spirit align, and energy is not only released but focused."
One thing is for certain: when questions, big questions (questions that matter to the future of an organization) are asked and explored, it can be a very powerful force because it is essential for coevolving the futures we want, rather than the futures we get.

24. Sustainability of a KM endeavor
There are three fundamental processes that
sustain profound changes such as the
introduction of a KM system:
- developing networks of committed people
- improving business results
- enhancing personal results
To achieve sustainability, there must be a
focus on learning and learning how to harness
the learning capabilities that lead to innovation.
For a knowledge management effort to work, it must be understood that no progress is sustainable unless innovators learn to understand why the system is pushing back, and how their own attitudes and perceptions contribute to the"pushback." Until they see this, there will be no development of systematic strategies for sustaining profound change.
Once there is intellectual understanding there can be emotional engagement, leading to sustained action, all in a positive feedback loop.
"I believe that people do have passion to produce results says consultant and writer Fred Kofman, "but not business results. Sure, they care about business results, but they really have a passion for the quality of their own lives. Once they experience living their lives more closely to the way they really want to live, that passion will emerge." The enhancement of personal results is often the first source of reinforcing energy for sustaining deep change. And, it is inherently satisfying to work in a network of committed people. Given the choice, very few people would not want to become part of a network where there is excitement, perseverance,, innovation, experimentation, and commitment. As Dr. W, Edwards Deming used to say, "People seek joy in work."
In this day of bottom line focus, when employees often assume that personal needs are subservient to the organization's needs, it is truly liberating to discover that the two can be aligned rather than in opposition. For those who have gone from a run-of-the-mill organization to one which supports learning and knowledge for everyone literally feel transformed. They learn to understand just how much they are worth, and the value of their lives and what they can relay into the workplace. They become intellectually-stimulated, energized, and emotionally-engaged.

25. Sustainability of a KM Endeavor (Contd….)
For significant change to lead to sustainability, hierarchical control must be put aside.
The emergence and development of informal networks must be supported so that people can share their tacit knowledge and help one another.
Managers need to surrender control.
And mental models need to be examined.
Managers need to surrender control in order for learning capabilities to be enhanced. This will lead to greater business results by eliminating wasteful practices and the development of new business practices which lead to better results.
The limits that block organizational learning initiatives have a great deal to do with the mental models embedded in the culture of an organization. For example: that hoarders, hierarchies, and stars are the order of the day! Once employees are forced to let go of the existing conventional wisdom of the organization, they can be innovative and creative, designing new approaches and learning to learn faster.

26. KM Software Tools Globalserve Knowcorp Hyperknowledge MicroStrategy
The Molloy Group
KnowledgeX Inc.
WebFarming.com
Softlab Enabling Tools
Imagination
Excalibur Technologies
Imaging Solutions
Grapevine Technologies
Intraspect Software
Milagro: The Power of Imagination
SOFTWARE
But getting information that's locked inside a brain or disparate computer systems into a central repository is no simple task. "Ultimately, everyone must feed information in as they gain experience and expertise, and the information must be stored and routed so that people can use it. The design and thinking that go into the process are crucial. Success doesn't happen by accident," says Bock.

27. Knowledge Management - the essence
Is understanding and valuing intangible assets over tangible.
Understanding that human and intellectual capital are the greatest resources
Managing the skills and competencies that lie within an organization, and allowing them to blossom
Allowing people to be the best that they can be; optimizing performance.
Competitive success will be based less on how strategically physical and financial resources are allocated, and more on how strategically intellectual capital is managed - from capturing, coding and disseminating information, to acquiring new competencies through training and development, to re-engineering business processes. Ray Stata of Analog Devices has stated that "the rate at which individuals and organizations learn may be the only sustainable competitive advantage, especially in knowledge intensive industries." Further emphasizing this point, it has been said that "a firm's competitive advantage depends more than anything on its knowledge... what it knows -- how much it uses what it knows -- and how fast it can know something new" (Prusak 1997).

28. KM & Systems – the main focus
Key questions I’d like to raise:
What is the relationship between KM & systems?
Can “knowledge” serve as a unifying concept for understanding organizations and systems?
Can there be design principles and techniques based on KM concepts, for designing organizations and their systems?

29. KM as a management concept / approach
A parade of management ideas
Classical administrative theories 1940’s
Scientific management (e.g. Taylor) 1950’s
Human relations approach …
TQM 1980’s
BPR ’s
KM !! 2000~
… ??
Is KM one among many approaches?
Shouldn’t knowledge be a fundamental concept for understanding and managing organizations?

30. Knowledge in Computing & IS
The trend is toward (increasingly explicit)
“knowledge representation” in systems
Programs ’s-
Database schemas (data independence from programs)1970’s-
Conceptual data modeling (domains, enterprises) 1980’s-
Knowledge-based systems (knowledge about world separate from inference engine) 1980’s-
Knowledge sharing among systems (“ontologies”) 1990’s-
Software agents 1990’s-
Semantic web 2000’s-
The Question is: What is the role of knowledge in IS? Shouldn’t
knowledge be a fundamental concept in IS?

31. What is the role of knowledge in IS, and IS development?
There is knowledge in:
User organization
Developer organization
Various artifacts
Where is the knowledge?
What kinds of knowledge?
Whose knowledge?
How does knowledge get “into” the systems?
What is change effected?
Systems
Design
Requirements
Analysis
Customer
Bill
Marketing
Update
Inventory
Credit
Authorize
Entry
Order
Delivery
Schedule
Software
Implementation
Spec
Tables
VC++ Code
Architecture
VB Code
ERD
Forms
Abstractions about world
Knowledge
about world
Operations on system
Abstractions about system

32. Knowledge in organizations and systems
Management is about achieving effectiveness through K and action
Info systems (development) is about converting (organizational) K into (automated) action.
Can there be a theory of K and action to help understand, analyze, and design organizations and their systems?
Broader perspective –
K as unifying concept:
How to design effective organizations and systems?
Limited KM perspective:
How to manage the knowledge in organizations and systems

33. KM systems as specialized classes of systems or “applications” e. g
KM systems as specialized classes of systems or “applications” e.g., [Alavi Leidner 01] [Marwick 01] [Smith Farquhar 00]
Groupware
Data mining
Learning tools
E-bulletin boards
Knowledge repositories and databases, FAQs
Discussion forums
Knowledge directories
Expert systems
Workflow systems
Taxonomies
Document classification
Portals & metadata
Text search
Summarization
Relationships discovery
Visualization …
Contrasted with more conventional information systems

34. Five Paradigms of IT Support - a rough typology
Processing
Repository
Agent
Medium
Tool

35. 1. the “processing” paradigm
Here, the focus is on the processing (usually fixed a priori)
E.g. sales orders processing, bank account statements, teller machine processing...
Qualities emphasized:
speed
accuracy
correctness
...
Info. structures:
data items
lists
arrays
trees
...
Info. operations:
calculate
transform
...
Processing

36. 2. the “repository” paradigm
Here, the focus is on the storage and retrieval
E.g. document management systems, online catalogues, databases...
Qualities emphasized:
persistence
accessibility
integrity
security
...
Info. structures:
records
links/ relationships
indexes
catalogues
...
Info. operations:
create/read/ update/delete
lookup
navigate
integrate
...
Repository

37. 3. the “tool” paradigm Tool Qualities emphasized: usability
The focus is on enabling the user
E.g. spreadsheet, word processing...
Qualities emphasized:
usability
flexibility
extensibility
...
Info. operations:
manipulation of user’s information representations
...
Info. structures:
conceptual information structures e.g., cells in spreadsheets
...
Tool

38. 4. the “medium” paradigm Medium Qualities emphasized: presence
Here the focus is on communication
E.g. , teleconferencing, groupware
Qualities emphasized:
presence
fidelity
authenticity
privacy
...
Info. structures:
message
conversation
conference
...
Info. operations:
send/receive
share
...
Medium

39. 5. the “agent” paradigm Agent Qualities emphasized: ability
Here the focus is on assisting the user
E.g. mail filters, web crawlers, knowledge discovery...
Qualities emphasized:
ability
intelligence
trustworthiness
...
Info. operations:
planning & goal achievement
“understanding”
delegation
...
Info. structures:
Goals tasks/plans
conceptual structures
interdependencies among agents...
Agent

40. How much domain knowledge is embedded in the system?
Medium
Tool
Least
Embedded
knowledge
Repository
Processing
Agent
Most
Embedded
knowledge
Knowledge Media? A provocative concept Suggests that we need to span the full range

41. Major design questions for organizational information systems
The term “K Media” suggests that an organization’s IS
would be a mix of systems with more/less embedded K
Major design questions
- Who needs what K to achieve what objectives / responsibilities?
- How much to embed in machines?
- Where in the organization?
- How to make tradeoffs – benefits vs. risks vulnerabilities?
E.g. speed, accuracy, economy vs. inflexibility, privacy
risks, loss of control, …

42. What design methods and techniques are available?
Most conventional IS analysis and design techniques are focused on “data” & “processing”
HCI research has strengthened design methods especially for “media” and “tool”
The Key Question is:
How to bring in knowledge concepts for designing organizations and systems?

43. Modelling Strategic Actor Relationships and Rationales
Modelling Strategic Actor Relationships and Rationales modeling framework
One possible
approach...
Strategic Actors
have goals, beliefs, abilities, commitments
are semi-autonomous
freedom of action, constrained by relationships with others
not fully knowable or controllable
has knowledge to guide action, but only partially explicit
depend on each other
for goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, resources to be furnished

44. Modelling systems & organizations in terms of Strategic Dependencies among actors (Patient & Health Service provider)

45. Strategic Dependency Relationship
I want …
Actor B
I can …
Actor A D
Car Be Repaired

47. Strategic Rationales about alternative configurations of relationships with other actors – Why? How? How else?
[Yu AOSE01]

48. Analysis and Design Support
opportunities and vulnerabilities
ability, workability, viability, believability
insurance, assurance, enforceability
node and loop analysis
design support
raising issues
exploring alternatives
evaluating, making tradeoffs
justifying, settling
based on qualitative reasoning

49. Compare: modeling conventional systems modeling D inputs outputs
agents – implicit knowledge
wants and
abilities
inputs
outputs D
2. goals & (limited) explicit knowledge
functional
decomposition
means-ends
alternatives

50. Premises, key concepts D
Actors are semi-autonomous, partially knowable
Strategic actors, intentional dependencies
have choice, reasons about alternate means to ends
wants and
abilities
means-ends
alternatives
Intentionality
Autonomy
Sociality
Identity & Boundaries
Strategic Reflectivity
Rational Self-Interest

51. In conclusion: Question for you
In the context of KM and systems
- What is organizational knowledge?
Org. knowledge is in people and machines
- How is it collected, structured, and managed?
Includes human & automated processes
- How does this impact an organization?
Systems need to be designed in organizational context, with attention to K & action of strategic actors

52. In conclusion: Contd….
In the context of KM and systems
- What tools do AI & KM provide to do the above?
Various technologies offer different capabilities with limitations & risks; need analysis & design tradeoffs
Conventional systems analysis and design techniques are ill-equipped for analyzing knowledge & action of strategic actors
AI and KM offer ideas for new frameworks
How are the issues of KM related to DSS?

53. References
R. Smith & A. Farquhar. The Road Ahead for Knowledge management – An AI perspective. AI Magazine. Winter 2000.
A.D. Marwick. Knowledge Management Technology. IBM Systems Journal. 40(4):
M. Alavi & D.E. Leidner. Knowledge Management & Knowledge Management Systems: Conceptual Foundations and Research Issues. MIS Quarterly. 25(1):