CHAPTER 11 REVIEW: MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge management and collaboration systems
are among the fastest growing
areas of corporate and government software investment. The past
decade has
shown an explosive growth in research on knowledge and knowledge management in the economics, management, and information systems
fields. Knowledge management
and collaboration are
closely related. Knowledge
that cannot be
communicated and shared with
others is nearly useless.
Knowledge management has become an
important theme at many large business firms as managers realize that
much of their firm’s value depends on the firm’s ability to create and
manage knowledge.
Knowledge management refers to the set
of business processes
developed in
an organization to create, store,
transfer, and apply
knowledge. Knowledge management increases the ability of the organization to learn from its environment and to incorporate knowledge
into its business processes. Each stage in the
value chain adds value to raw data
and information as they are transformed into usable knowledge.
The knowledge management value chain includes
four main steps that add value to raw data and information as it is transformed
into usable knowledge:
1. Knowledge acquisition: Organizations acquire knowledge in a number of
ways, depending on
the type of knowledge they seek.
2. Knowledge storage: Knowledge storage generally involves the creation of
a database. Expert systems also help corporations preserve the knowledge that is acquired by incorporating that
knowledge into organizational processes
and culture.
3. Knowledge dissemination: Training programs, informal networks, and
shared management experience communicated through a supportive culture help managers focus their attention on the important knowledge
and information.
4.
Knowledge
application:
Ultimately, new
knowledge must be built into a firm’s business processes and key application systems, including enterprise applications for managing key
internal business processes and relationships with
customer and
suppliers.
There are three major types
of knowledge management
systems: enterprise-wide knowledge management
systems, knowledge work
systems, and
intelligent techniques.
1. Enterprise-Wide Knowledge Management Systems : General-purpose
firmwide efforts
to collect,
store, distribute, and
apply digital content and knowledge. It is also include supporting technologies such as portals, search engines, e-mail,
instant messaging, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking), and learning management systems.
2. Knowledge
Work Systems : Specialized systems built
for engineers, scientists, and other knowledge workers charged with
discovering and creating new knowl- edge
for a company.
3. Intelligent Techniques : Data mining, expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic,
genetic algorithms, and intelligent agents
are the example of this. These techniques
have different objectives, from a focus
on discovering knowledge, to distilling knowledge
in the form of rules
for a computer program, to discoveringaoptimalasolutionsbforcproblems. Intelligent
agents are software programs with
built-in
or learned knowledge
bases that carry out specific, repetitive, and
predictable tasks for an individual user, business
process, or software applica- tion. Intelligent agents
can be programmed to navigate through large amounts of data to locate useful
information and in some
cases
act on that
information on behalf of the user.
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