Managing

Knowledge
IT 221
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

IMPORTANT
 
DIMENSIONS OF KNOWLEDGE
– Knowledge is a firm asset.
• Intangible
• Creation of knowledge from data, information, requires organizational
resources
• As it is shared, experiences network effects

– Knowledge has different forms.

• May be explicit (documented) or tacit (residing in minds)
• Know-how, craft, skill
• How to follow procedure
• Knowing why things happen (causality
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

IMPORTANT DIMENSIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

– Knowledge has a location.
• Cognitive event
• Both social and individual
• “Sticky” (hard to move), situated (enmeshed in firm’s culture), contextual
(works only in certain situations)

– Knowledge is situational.
• Conditional: Knowing when to apply procedure
• Contextual: Knowing circumstances to use certain tool
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
To transform information into knowledge, firm must expend additional resources
to discover patterns, rules, and contexts where knowledge works

• Wisdom:
– Collective and individual experience of applying knowledge to solve problems
– Involves where, when, and how to apply knowledge

• Knowing how to do things effectively and efficiently in ways others cannot

duplicate is prime source of profit and competitive advantage
– For example, Having a unique build-to-order production system
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

 Organizational learning

– Process in which organizations learn

•Gain experience through collection of data, measurement, trial and error ,
and feedback
•Adjust behavior to reflect experience
–Create new business processes
–Change patterns of management decision making
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management
•Knowledge management

– Set of business processes developed in an organization to create, store,

transfer, and apply knowledge
• Knowledge management value chain:
– Each stage adds value to raw data and information as they are
transformed into usable knowledge
– Knowledge acquisition
– Knowledge storage
– Knowledge dissemination
– Knowledge application
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management
 Knowledge management value chain

1. Knowledge acquisition
•Documenting tacit and explicit knowledge
– Storing documents, reports, presentations, best practices
– Unstructured documents (e.g., e-mails)
– Developing online expert networks
•Creating knowledge
•Tracking data from TPS and external sources
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

Knowledge management value chain

2. Knowledge storage
•Databases
•Document management systems
•Role of management:
– Support development of planned knowledge storage systems.
– Encourage development of corporate-wide schemas for indexing documents.
– Reward employees for taking time to update and store documents properly. 
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

 Knowledge management value chain

3. Knowledge dissemination
•Portals, wikis
•E-mail, instant messaging
•Search engines
•Collaboration tools
•A deluge of information?
– Training programs, informal networks, and shared management experience help
managers focus attention on important information. 
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management

 Knowledge management value chain

4. Knowledge application
•To provide return on investment, organizational knowledge must become systematic part
of management decision making and become situated in decision- support systems.
– New business practices
– New products and services
– New markets
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
 Knowledge management value chain
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Organizational roles and responsibilities
– Chief knowledge officer executives
– Dedicated staff / knowledge managers
– Communities of practice (COPs)

• Informal social networks of professionals and employees within and outside firm who
have similar work-related activities and interests
• Activities include education, online newsletters, sharing experiences and techniques
• Facilitate reuse of knowledge, discussion
• Reduce learning curves of new employees 
 THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
 Three major types of knowledge management systems:
1. Enterprise-wide knowledge management systems • General-purpose firm-
wide efforts to collect, store, distribute, and apply digital content and
knowledge
2. Knowledge work systems (KWS) • Specialized systems built for engineers,
scientists, other knowledge workers charged with discovering and creating
new knowledge
3. Intelligent techniques • Diverse group of techniques such as data mining
used for various goals: discovering knowledge, distilling knowledge,
discovering optimal solutions 
THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
Three major types of knowledge in enterprise:

1. Structured documents
• Reports, presentations
• Formal rules
2. Semistructured documents
• E-mails, videos
3. Unstructured, tacit knowledge

• 80 percent of an organization’s business content is

semistructured or unstructured.
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
 • Enterprise content management systems

– Help capture, store, retrieve, distribute, preserve

•Documents, reports, best practices
•Semistructured knowledge (e-mails)

– Bring in external sources

•News feeds, research

– Tools for communication and collaboration

•Blogs, wikis, and so on
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
 ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

 Enterprise content management systems

– Key problem—Developing taxonomy

•Knowledge objects must be tagged with categories for retrieval

– Digital asset management systems

•Specialized content management systems for classifying, storing, managing
unstructured digital data
•Photographs, graphics, video, audio
 ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

 
Locating and sharing expertise
– Provide online directory of corporate experts in well-defined knowledge
domains
– Search tools enable employees to find appropriate expert in a company
– Social networking and social business tools for finding knowledge outside
the firm
• Saving, tagging, sharing Web pages Enterprise-Wide
 ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
 
SYSTEMS
Learning management systems (LMS)
– Provide tools for management, delivery, tracking, and assessment of
employee learning and training
– Support multiple modes of learning
• CD-ROM, Web-based classes, online forums, and so on
– Automates selection and administration of courses
– Assembles and delivers learning content
– Measures learning effectiveness

– Massively open online courses (MOOCs)

– Web course open to large numbers of participants
 ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
 
 Knowledge work systems
– Systems for knowledge workers to help create new knowledge and integrate that knowledge
into business
• Knowledge workers
– Researchers, designers, architects, scientists, engineers who create knowledge for the
organization
– Three key roles:
1. Keeping organization current in knowledge
2. Serving as internal consultants regarding their areas of expertise
3. Acting as change agents, evaluating, initiating, and promoting change projects
 ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Requirements of knowledge work systems

– Sufficient computing power for graphics, complex calculations
– Powerful graphics and analytical tools
– Communications and document management
– Access to external databases
– User-friendly interfaces
– Optimized for tasks to be performed (design engineering, financial analysis)
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
Examples of knowledge work systems

– CAD (computer-aided design):

• Creation of engineering or architectural designs
• 3D printing

– Virtual reality systems:

• Simulate real-life environments
• 3D medical modeling for surgeons
• Augmented reality (AR) systems
• VRML – Investment workstations:
• Streamline investment process and consolidate internal, external data
for brokers, traders, portfolio managers 
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
 Intelligent techniques:
Used to capture individual and collective knowledge and to extend
knowledge base
– To capture tacit knowledge: Expert systems, case-based reasoning,
fuzzy logic
– Knowledge discovery: Neural networks and data mining
– Generating solutions to complex problems: Genetic algorithms
– Automating tasks: Intelligent agents

• Artificial intelligence (AI) technology:

– Computer-based systems that emulate human behavior
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

 Expert systems:
– Capture tacit knowledge in very specific and limited domain of human
expertise
– Capture knowledge of skilled employees as set of rules in software
system that can be used by others in organization
– Typically perform limited tasks that may take a few minutes or hours,
for example:
• Diagnosing malfunctioning machine
• Determining whether to grant credit for loan
– Used for discrete, highly structured decision making 
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

How expert systems work

– Knowledge base: Set of hundreds or thousands of rules
– Inference engine: Strategy used to search knowledge base
• Forward chaining: Inference engine begins with information entered by
user and searches knowledge base to arrive at conclusion
• Backward chaining: Begins with hypothesis and asks user questions until
hypothesis is confirmed or disproved 
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Successful expert systems:

– Con-Way Transportation built expert system to automate and optimize planning of
overnight shipment routes for nationwide freight-trucking business

• Most expert systems deal with problems of classification.

– Have relatively few alternative outcomes
– Possible outcomes are known in advance

•Many expert systems require large, lengthy, and expensive

development and maintenance efforts.
– Hiring or training more experts may be less expensive
 ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
Case-based reasoning (CBR)

– Descriptions of past experiences of human specialists (cases), stored in knowledge base

– System searches for cases with characteristics similar to new one and applies solutions of old
case to new case
– Successful and unsuccessful applications are grouped with case
– Stores organizational intelligence: Knowledge base is continuously expanded and refined by
users
– CBR found in
• Medical diagnostic systems
• Customer support 
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Case-based reasoning (CBR)

ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Fuzzy logic systems

– Rule-based technology that represents imprecision used in linguistic categories (e.g.,

“cold,” “cool”) that represent range of values

– Describe a particular phenomenon or process linguistically and then represent that

description in a small number of flexible rules

– Provides solutions to problems requiring expertise that is difficult to represent with IF-
THEN rules
• Autofocus in cameras
• Detecting possible medical fraud
• Sendai’s subway system acceleration controls
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
Machine learning

– How computer programs improve performance without explicit

programming
• Recognizing patterns
• Experience
• Prior learnings (database)

– Contemporary examples
• Google searches
• Recommender systems on Amazon, Netflix
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Neural networks

– Find patterns and relationships in massive amounts of data too

complicated for humans to analyze
– “Learn” patterns by searching for relationships, building models, and
correcting over and over again
– Humans “train” network by feeding it data inputs for which outputs are
known, to help neural network learn solution by example
– Used in medicine, science, and business for problems in pattern
classification, prediction, financial analysis, and control and optimization
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Neural networks
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS

Genetic algorithms

– Useful for finding optimal solution for specific problem by examining very
large number of possible solutions for that problem
– Conceptually based on process of evolution
• Search among solution variables by changing and reorganizing component parts
using processes such as inheritance, mutation, and selection
– Used in optimization problems (minimization of costs, efficient scheduling,
optimal jet engine design) in which hundreds or thousands of variables exist
– Able to evaluate many solution alternatives quickly 
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
 Intelligent agents

– Work without direct human intervention to carry out specific, repetitive, and
predictable tasks for user, process, or application
• Deleting junk e-mail
• Finding cheapest airfare

– Use limited built-in or learned knowledge base

• Some are capable of self-adjustment, for example: Siri

– Agent-based modeling applications:

• Systems of autonomous agents
• Model behavior of consumers, stock markets, and supply chains; used to predict spread
of epidemics
ENTERPRISE-WIDE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS
Hybrid AI systems

– Genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and expert

systems integrated into single application to take advantage of best
features of each

– For example: Matsushita “neurofuzzy” washing machine that

combines fuzzy logic with neural networks
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