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- Knowledge Networking
- Knowledge Object
- Knowledge Product
- Knowledge Recipe
- Knowledge Repository
- Knowledge Representation (KR)
Knowledge MetricsIndicators to judge the impact of knowledge management initiative and presentive. Like any initiative, knowledge management will make an impact only if its benefits can be quantified. What constitutes success in knowledge management? The impact of knowledge management on financial performance is often indirect, rather than direct. Economic returns from knowledge may also not be easy to quantify. So we must rely on more general indicators of success. Yet, there should be some metrics to ensure that knowledge management efforts are properly channelized. Some of the attributes that can be used to define success in knowledge management are: Comfort throughout the organization with the concept of knowledge management. Growth in the resources attached to the project, including staffing and budgets. Growth in the volume of knowledge content and usage (for example, the number of documents in repositories and the number of downloads and number of participants in discussion forums). The likelihood that the project will be sustaining beyond a particular individual or two, that is, the project is an organizational initiative. Some evidence of financial return, either for the knowledge management activity itself or for the larger organization. This linkage need not be rigorously specified and may be only perceptual. Knowledge NetworkingThe process of sharing and developing knowledge through technology and human interaction. Exchange of e-mails, group discussions, seminars, online forums, wikis and even blogging facilitate knowledge networking. The philosophy here is that knowledge management is facilitated by the interaction of ideas and people, instead of depending totally on passive forms of knowledge sharing such as downloading documents from a repository. Knowledge ObjectA piece of knowledge held in a well-defined and structured format, such that it is easy to replicate and disseminate. A set of standard operating procedures is a good example. Knowledge PackagingFiltering, editing, searching and organizing pieces of knowledge. Journalists and research analysts do this kind of work. The task involved in knowledge packaging must not be underestimated. It usually involves careful understanding of what has been already documented and representing it in a user friendly format. Knowledge ProductA product which consists almost entirely of information or knowledge. Imaginative thinking can make even commodities knowledge intensive, if not knowledge products. By wrapping information around commodities, companies can create “intelligent products”. Thus, Cemex has converted cement into an information business while Fedex has done this in case of document movement. These two companies have embedded IT into various business processes especially logistics and tracking so that the value comes not from the basic products / services but from the knowledge surrounding them. Knowledge RecipeThe process of using existing knowledge assets as inputs and combining them in distinctive ways to create useful outputs and outcomes. Companies like IBM are good at creating and using reusable components. Knowledge RefiningThe process of filtering, aggregating and summarizing knowledge drawn from various sources. Knowledge RepositoryA store of knowledge documents and artifacts. The term typically refers to explicit forms of knowledge, such as documents and databases. The attributes of a good repository are comprehensiveness, taxonomy (classification), structure and an efficient search facility. Once tacit knowledge is conceptualized and articulated, it can be converted into document form. These documents can be kept in a repository. The quality of documents can be assessed by the number of downloads, the number of times the document has been cited and judgments by experts. Besides written documents, audio and video recordings are also possible. According to Michael Zack53 repositories can support integrative and interactive applications. Integrative applications mean explicit knowledge flows into and out of a repository. The repository is the prime medium for knowledge exchange. Interactive applications mean producers and users come together. The repository is a byproduct of interaction and collaboration rather than the primary focus of the application. At one extreme, users and producers do not belong to the same practice community. This can be called electronic publishing. At the other extreme, users and producers belong to the same community and together work to integrate and build on their collective knowledge. This can be called an integrated knowledge base. A good example is a best practices database. Electronic publishing can be highly cost effective. But an integrated knowledge base provides better support for solving problems, innovating and leveraging opportunities. The greatest impact may come from combining the two. Knowledge Representation (KR)A term commonly used to refer to representations intended for processing by modern computers. In the 1980s, work began on the development of formal KR languages and systems. The “Cye” project worked on encoding the information a reader needed in order to understand an encyclopedia. Prolog and KL-One programming languages facilitated KR. Then came XML. Now the semantic web is growing in size. In semantic networks, each node represents a concept and arcs are used to define the relationships among the concepts Efforts are on to represent knowledge in the same way that it is represented in the human mind and to represent knowledge in the form of human language. But we still do not know how knowledge is represented in the human mind. We also do not know how to manipulate human language in the same way the human mind does it. According to Randal Davis, Howard Shrobe and Peter Szolovits of MIT54, KR must be understood in terms of the five distinct roles it plays: KR acts as a surrogate: Reasoning goes on internally but the things we wish to reason about lie externally. The representation is of things that exist in the external world. The correspondence between the surrogate and the intended referent is the semantics for the representation. The surrogate must be close to the real thing. KR is an approximation of reality: Each representation attends to some things and ignores others. Essentially we decide how and what to see in the world. This helps us to bring some parts of the world into sharp focus while blurring others. KR is a fragmentary theory of intelligent reasoning: The representation typically incorporates only a part of the insight or belief that motivated it. The insight or belief is in turn only a part of the complex and multi faceted phenomenon of intelligent reasoning. KR is a medium for efficient computation: Reasoning in machines is a computational process. In other words, to use a representation, we must compute with it. KR is the means by which we express things about the world, the medium of expression and communication in which we tell the machine about the world: So the questions to be raised here are: How well does the representation function as a medium of expression? How general is it? How precise? How easy is it for us to talk or think in that language? What kinds of things can be easily communicated in the language? What things are difficult to communicate? All the roles mentioned above are important. Ignoring any one of them may lead to serious inadequacies. 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