Knowledge management
Alavi, Maryam, and Leidner, Dorothy E. “Knowledge Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, and Benefits.” Communications of the Association for Information Systems. Vol 1, article 7. February 1999.
From page 6:
Two major points emerge from this [definition of knowledge]:
1. Because knowledge is personalized, in order for one person’s knowledge to be useful to another individual, it must be communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.
2. Hoards of information are of little value: only that information which is actively processed in the mind of an individual through a process of reflection, enlightenment, and learning can be useful. Knowledge management, then, refers to a systemic and organizationally specified process for acquiring, organizing and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.
Questions to address:
Point 1:
Does this mean that group revision in a classroom isn’t likely to involve the conveyance of knowledge?
Undergrads reviewing each other’s work might not be looking at information which has been “communicated in such a manner as to be interpretable and accessible to the other individual.” I think we can logically posit more than one reason for this assertion:
- The classroom writing assignment, whatever it is, likely has a college instructor as the stated audience. If that’s the case, then the readers are not the intended audience: they lack the education and the experience.
- My own experience with such assignments indicates that they are frequently directed toward someone other than the instructor (a local business owner, a professor within another discipline, or a fictional supervisor or future employer). Again, whether real or imagined, the intended audience is someone other than the student readers; thus, the group work might not qualify as knowledge work if they are incapable of interpreting, or providing their own intellectual framework, for the information presented by the author.
- The student author might not have sufficient experience within the discipline in order to understand the information presented within the paper as “knowledge.”
These claims are dependent upon a number of assumptions which I’ll try to lay out. For one, they assume that students are still novices concerning their chosen field. While likely to be true, it’s only fair to point out that some non-traditional students include those who have experience in their field and who are returning in order to obtain a diploma or certification. A second assumption is that there is no other communication taking place: that, in fact, the information (non-contextualized data, thus, not knowledge) contained within the writing assignment in question is the only information or data being exchanged. However, anyone who has taught such a class knows that this cannot be the case. Any group of students will naturally share knowledge simply in exchanging papers: a look, a comment, question, or statement undoubtedly means that there is transfer of knowledge. In short, the writing assignments and their subject matter are not the only possible conveyances of knowledge.
A third assumption, and this one is pretty serious with regard to TC service courses, is that groups of students within a single class are likely to be made up of different majors. A TC service course of 20 students is likely to have at least 10 or a dozen majors represented by those students, meaning that a group of two or more students will mostly likely represent more than a single field of study. Furthermore, I have course descriptions from 82 different schools offering TC service courses. Of those course descriptions, 23% contain the word “field” or “discipline” used to indicate that more than one major is serviced by this course, and that the work within the course may well be (some state it outright) tailored to each student’s field of study. Thus, we have added support for the claim that students in separate majors participating in group revision may not be engaging in the sharing of knowledge due to disparate levels of experience within those separate fields.
Point 2 –
Alavi’s second description does seem to indicate that knowledge management takes place within the context of classrooms, however stridently I may seem to object above in the specific case of group revision projects. Classrooms, and in particular writing classrooms, are indeed set up to enable “systemic and organizationally specified process[es] for acquiring, organizing, and communicating both tacit and explicit knowledge of employees so that other employees may make use of it to be more effective and productive in their work.”
The point of group revision exercises, and I’ll know more about what others think once I get my IRB paperwork finished, seems to be to expose writers to the feedback of others, and to expose readers to the approach used by other writers. The process of feedback, regardless of what form it takes, certainly seems to be both “systemic” and “organizationally specified” (particularly if the instructor has gone to the trouble of using assignment descriptions, prompts, peer review prompts and instructions, and assigned peer reviewers tasks to complete during the peer review process. Thus, the system of knowledge management is at least IN PLACE in the TC service course classroom, whether it’s in use or not or whether knowledge is exchanged.
So, given Alavi’s two points and given my own critique, I might wind up arguing that the system necessary to support knowledge management exists in the TC service course; however, the participants might not be capable of carrying it out. Regardless, I think knowledge management is turning out to be a convenient way of categorizing and comparing group revision in the workplace and group revision in the classroom.
Showing posts with label knowledge management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knowledge management. Show all posts
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
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.
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.
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