IS 456 Class II - 4/9/2008

Two Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: I modified the format for this week to two stories and a parting shot from my previous entry, where in I indicated that there will be three stories each week. The first story will interpret or shall I say document what I gathered in class, the second Story will be about the readings and finally the parting shot. I will start with the parting shot, sort of like reading the conclusion to get a gist before delving into the whole....

Parting Shot: Knowledge is about NODES and RELATIONSHIPS as can be seen from the logic modelling done by Burns of Steven Job's paragraph on "Love What you Do". The whole paragraph when looked through the lens of LOGIC MODELLING can be viewed as the following schematic representation, The theme of the whole class focused on LOGIC MODELLING as you will see from Story Two. So take away for the week, put on the logic modelling hat to get better at KM.

Knowledge management can be defined as Structuring, Storing, capturing, disseminating, using knowledge we gain out of this relationships between nodes.

Story Two: Class notes. The first hour (an entire hour) in class was spent on introductions, with the KM context interspersed in between. The discussion warmed up into Intellectual Assets and Tacit and Explicit knowledge and a brief discussion on Nonanka's article and how Nonaka could have got it wrong. Al then took us through logic modelling process (using examples) using decision tree examples. All examples were geared toward how to translate directives in plain English into "Actions, Conditions and Rules". Powerful stuff. Brought back memories of pseudo code and structured English and programming. This followed a discussion on The models of KM as discussed by Bowman. The Network Model and the Repository Model. The discussion moved on to the definitions of important concepts in KM and a Question on Which is better? Knowledge or Truth?

My thoughts on this (it is my own compilation!!): Truth is a reality that is snapshot in time, it is temporal. While Knowledge is an unending collection, a summation if you will of the content of the collective human mind, that grows, gets modified and is organic. Knowledge modifies truth and transcends the temporal nature of Truth, following the cognitive process in learning.

Story One: the Readings. As an afterthought from last week, I am going to label each article I read, with the date it was created, so I don't confuse old concepts with the new.
1) CFO-"Who you know" - [2003]: A paper that talks about the immense nature of knowledge in existence, expert systems to capture knowledge of the brightest and the best, talks about folks who coined "don't try to bottle it, just try to find it when you need it". Finally discusses why acronyms are being used today, with the computation that it will take us 2018 years to watch all videos that have been captured.
2) Notes on Scheriber: Chapters 2 and 8. [2000]: Discusses Process roles in KM and Knowledge elicitation techniques to extract data for modelling. Elicitation uses two questions: a) how to get experts to tell us what they do and 2) How to determine what constitutes their problem solving competence. It also has a interesting definition of experts: academic/practicing/samurai.
3) Topiary - case study [2004]: is about a Chicago based company that sells KM tools, the two slides at the end on measurement appear to have been slapped together as an afterthought.
4) IA PowerPoint extrapolated from "one more time what is KM" by Harris and Berg []: defines Intellectual assets and talks about tacit and explicit km.
5) Alvi - a review of KM and KMS [2001]: Lots of material on KM with interesting tables, particularly one about taxonomy and examples. (I think I like the work TAXONOMY, just like I liked the world FOLKSONOMY, makes me sound intelligent?). Great discussion on KM I am sure, but I did not find anything to store away for a rainy day!!
6) Bohn - measuring and managing technological knowledge. [1994]: Great paper at that time, I am sure. He concludes with a statement from Lord Kelvin from 1890, which was a nice touch. But to his credit in 1994 he was thinking about using decision trees and variables and how efficiency can be improved by understanding the impact of these decision tree variables better.
7) finally, Nonaka [1991]: Talks about spiral knowledge and forms of Knowledge and combinational relationship between tacit/tacit, explicit/explicit, tacit/explicit and explicit/tacit. Also talks about how Japanese firms in the 1990's produces superior products by using slogan's and themes to motivate and drive quality and innovation.

Conclusion: This is a force of habit, wanting to conclude. It is interesting that all the readings we are doing are a little dated. Nonaka's went back to 1991. Is this a representation of the sate of KM, stale with nothing new?. I remember having to study the great masters in History of Architecture before I studied the contemporary greats. May be the readings from classes 8 on up will focus on today's material. I will be patient.