Knowledge Management as Codification Tool?

The data gathered for my dissertation will, eventually, have to be codified (organized in a meaningful way). Rich Rice suggested I use communications theory as a way of understanding what I find, whereas Fred Kemp (my dissertation chair) suggested systems theory. I’ve only looked preliminarily into those, but so far there’s nothing that suggests to me I could use them productively; however, there is one thing I’d like to comment upon.

Most theories I’ve encountered seem to try to account for static and dynamic, sameness and change, in some way. The communications theory I’ve read so far (and that’s not much) offers various metaphors for understanding communications between and among organizations: circle, star, etc., each figure accounting for power relationships and the supposed flow of information within that network. But there’s also an attempt to account for a change in state—what happens when the information is received, or how we can determine whether that information has been received and that therefore some sort of communication has taken place—that leads to speculation on the difference between organizations and individuals who stay the same and those that change, and what forms that change takes.

Systems theory (wherein I’ve read a bit more) is often an extended discourse on little but change itself: how the parts shape the whole, or the actions of the whole, or how understanding a system can change the system itself. . .on and on about static and dynamic systems. So, at the very least we can speculate that sameness and change are important to theorists in more than one area.

I’ve just read over Andrew P. McAfee’s “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” (http://bit.ly/ddzslZ) in which he defines Enterprise 2.0 along with six characteristics he’s identified as belonging to any technology that works as Enterprise 2.0. So, to begin, Enterprise 2.0 is "those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers" (McAfee 23). Earlier in the piece, he defines “platform” as a source of information in which “content is generated, or at least approved, by a small group, but then is widely visible” (22). So, to combine these two ideas, we might conclude that an Enterprise 2.0 platform is a method of communicating whereby a smaller group of people could distribute information to a larger group in such a way that the knowledge workers involved—whether the distributers or recipients—could see what others were doing and how they were doing it.

Into the mix goes McAfee’s SLATES acronym, which stands for the six components of such a system:

Search – “page layouts and navigation aids can help, but users are increasingly bypassing these in favor of keyword searches”

Links – “works best when there’s a dense link structure that changes over time and reflects the opinions of many people”

Authoring – “most people have something to contribute, whether it’s knowledge, insight, experience, a comment, a fact, an edit, a link, and so on. . .”

Tags – “don’t try to impose an up-categorization scheme; they instead let one emerge over time as a result of users’ actions.”

Extensions – computers using algorithms to suggest other content based on user behaviors. “Amazon’s recommendations were an early example of the use of extensions on the Web.”

Signals – pushed content

Each of these six components is based upon the idea of change: “bypassing,” “changes over time,” “something to contribute,” “emerge,” and then my own words “suggest” and “push.”

So, as a baseline, we can confidently claim that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are those which enable workers to (a) create, and (b) make visible not only what they’ve created but how they created it.

This model can be seen in how engineers communicate in the workplace: design reports, in particular, or even construction bids and statements of qualifications, almost never get their beginnings as a blank document. Engineers are always building (figuratively as well as literally) upon past documents and knowledge that others have created. Even beyond the rather simplistic view that engineering is based upon well-known characteristics of physics and chemistry, we can point to more subtle building blocks such as design projects done in the past which are similar to the one currently in the development stage. Building standards, such as LEED certification, ADA compliance, and EPA compliance exist prior to the design project, and thus the project itself is only part knowledge creation: it is in even larger part an effort at knowledge sharing and knowledge application.

In the technical writing class we use to prepare engineers for their future as knowledge workers who need to communicate with others, however, the knowledge is largely created (a) for that class as assigned by the instructor, and (b) by individual students. Thus, the knowledge management paradigm we see in writing in the workplace does not exist, or does not exist to the same extent, in the classroom.