Definitions of knowledge and knowledge management

What is information?

• The difference between data and information.
  • Information is data that is related into something that is meaningful in a certain context.
  • Knowledge is when the information can be applied for a specific purpose
• The clarity of the information
  • Bits and bytes
  • Confirmed and not confirmed information
  • Feedback-loops
• The relevance of the information
  • Generality
  • Level of abstraction
  • Validity over time
  • Degree of coverage
  • Quantity of information
• Information is more than symbol processing
  • Information is fresh. It is only valid in a context. It may get old and be useless.
  • The context determines its value
  • It satisfies certain needs
  • It satisfies often critical hygiene factors rather than motivators
• The creation of relation-ships through meta-communication
  • Identifying roles
  • Identifying interests in the communication transaction
  • Creating agreements about how to communicate
• Efficiency of communiction
  • A picture says more than 1000 words
  • A single word can say more than many days of conversation
• Communication as a game
  • To create territory
  • To hide behind descriptions that have no intention but to hide something
• How is a symbol created
  • Copy
  • Analogy
  • Metaphor
  • Frozen metaphors
  • Abstracted metaphors
  • Formal languages. Mathematics
• Information structures
  • Taxonomies
  • Functional hierarchies
  • Division into parts
  • Conceptual models
  • Sequential procedurial models
  • Logical models

What can you use computers for

• Word editing. Document creation
• Databases, registers
• Calculation, bookeeping, budgets
• Process management, robotics
• Decision support systems, Expert systems

What is knowledge

Examples of perspectives of knowledge:

• The sum of all our memories of how to do things
• Our semantic memory, i.e. the sum of all classifications of memories into concepts. The things we can name
• Knowledge can be seen as applied information. To apply information to reach some goal
• Knowledge therefore consists of causal relationships
• Knowledge are often described as:
  • Methods and Strategies
  • Relationships and structures
  • Measurements and Comparisons
  • A system of beliefs

What knowledge isused for

• Thoughts are simulated actions
• To create efficient automated routines of actions.
• To create experiences of patterns within patterns for the holistic map

The brain

The brain halves

• Left brain is rational, while the right brain is seeing the whole
• rational - whole
• sequential - parallell
• program - model
• language - picture

The brain waves
Alpha are quick while Delta are slow

Types of goals for types of thinking

• Cognitive balance drives creative synthesis
• Cognitive dissonance drives problem solving
• Stress is just the level of preparation for activity. It should be adjusted to the expected reward

The brain reorganizes itself

• The reorganisation is continually occurring with peaks at revolutionary insights
• The brain is reorganised in dreams
• The brain is reorganised by a shift in identity

Types of knowledge

All knowledge must be either:

• Formalized into domain independent knowledge. Then it is like mathematics or models. Eternal.
• Made situational by being related to a person. When knowledge is situated from experience in a context. Then it is bottom up

Un-transcended knowledge

• Cultural knowledge consists of situated pattterns that have not yet been made explicit and non-cultural.
• All pseudo-language should be case specific or article specific and created only for a temporary purpose

The knowledge processed in Knowledge Management

• Traditional KM is to sell organisational software
• New KM-systems concern how performance is evaluated. The managing of an organisation should be the managing of a machine. Even when the employees are mostly motivated by personal growth

The goal of thinking

• The basic aim with all knowledge processes is to program the knowledge into managable units that can be parts of more general or more abstract reasoning.
• The end goal is always to create more power to its owner

PKM and social competition

• To understand one colleague seems to be an unsurmountable obstacle. However, once you have done it you will find that it is easier to understand all others
• The problem is not to get anyone to talk. The problem is to ask questions and listen. Since nobody like to be cross-examined you need to learn to follow their dialogue and only guide it very gently.
• The crux is to build a model of what they say and ask questions about the missing parts

KM as representation and reuse of explicit knowledge

All else is processing of tacit knowledge and belongs to traditional organisational theory or organisational routines


KM in knowledge bases consists of process descriptions with

• Goals
• Requirements
• Measures
• Definitions
• General steps and milestones/tollgates
• Examples

KM as tacit knowledge
95% of all knowledge is tacit knowledge, i.e. it can only be demonstrated but not disseminated through language

What is most important in a graphical desciption

• Is it very clear what every node represents. If it is only described with one word is there a number on this word that facilitates a more extensive description of it somewhere else
• Is there an explicit name on all relationships. If not it may be very difficult to intuitively find out what it stands for
• Are the relationships directed?
• Can there be types on the relationships

Types of social knowledge

Agreements
An agreement is reach when two parties commit themselves into acting in a certain way
An agreement is the atomic unit of any relationship between animals

Authority
Knowledge can be tranformed into power and authority and power can be transformed into knowledge

Norm systems
All organisations are governed by norms. When norms become completely formalised we call them laws

Myths
Myths are knowledge that has emerged through stories without being formalised through a rational process

Religions
Religions are knowledge of belief systems and norm systems that has emerged through stories without being formalised through a rational process

Knowledge as protective prisons

• Knowledge is the form that contains the power of feelings. It protects us against anxiety
• We may get bored in culture because we have bought our safety by selling our freedom
• If knowledge is not integrated into regular work processes it becomes junk that can be stored in the attic

How knowledge is created

Stages of development in consciousness

1. Physical
2. Instinct
3. Social
4. Personal
5. Abstract
6. Creative
7. Systemic

Principles behind hierarchies of needs

• How we learn a method by
  • Assessing that something creates value
  • Repeating it
  • Analysing which parts creates the value
  • Formalising the method
  • Naming the method
  • Automating the method
• The needs create the knowledge and the knowledge creates the needs
• Once any organism is in balance there is a chance that an experience of a higher level method is perceived
• Once any organism experiences an unsatisfied need innovation occurs
• The efficiency of cognition is called intelligence when it comes to process measurable data and experience when it comes to process unmeasurable data
• Perception is always related to a goal:
  • Selective perception
  • Projection
  • Suggesstions

Emergence of knowledge in relation to language

Knowledge emerges as "froozen" methaphors in a community. A froozen methaphor is a when an expression of a sound or an analogy becomes a concept in itself

Dialectic evolution

• Hegel was the original founder of the use of the model
• Thesis is the new, Antithesis the reaction to or complement or consolidation of the new, Synthesis is the conscious balanced formalised knowledge
• To see means that the object is in focus. To acquire new knowledge
• To be means that the subject is also the object, Introversion in order to rebalance and synthesize acquired knowledge
• The probability fo the emotional system has one goal. To reduce insecurity and "feel good". You need to feel good before you can think and you need to think before you can act.
• Aggression, fear or sadness means that you feel but you do not yet understand. Understanding means that you act.

The negative side of knowledge consistency

Aging and defense mechanisms

• Defense mechanisms are habituated strategies for avoiding something
• The problem with a defense mechanism is that it is not developing since it is not reconsidered
• A defense mechanism can develop into a full blown dictatorship which then becomes a parasite that kills its host
• A definition of evil is that lower controls the higher. It is alwys a result of lack of responsability of those in charge
• Any kind of "relearning", rebalancing, psychotherapy or self analysis, require that:
  • The confession stage is passed: "I admit that there is something counter productive going on"
  • I am relaxed about it and I can talk about it

Formalizing and system design

• Why formalize and create routines
• Why do we use tools and models
• Knowledge resources where created and formalized step by step:
  • How to hunt
  • How to sow and reap
  • How to create tools for manufacturing
  • How to use machines
  • How to use computers

The knowledge dilemma, a side effect of formalisation

• Normal science which works well - revolution within science that does not produce - normal science again
• Unfreeze - repair - freeze
• Whatever you know you will forget or you do not know that it is relevant. You cannot talk about it since it is part of the froozen environment
• What you do not understand takes much attention. You think it is important

The expert society as a knowledge dilemma

• People understand by automating rituals and by communicating around rituals
• Experts cannot communicate their expertise since they never did understand it
• Learning tacit knowledge prevents growth in knowledge

How to escape the stupidity of knowledge opression

• Allow students to build and construct their own stories
• Knowledge create order but may prevent learning
• Students must learn how to learn. Students must learn to create their own formalisms

Knowledge Creation from a Personal Knowledge Management perspective

What is PKM
Personal knowledge management supports long time learning in the organisation. It is based on subordinates being proactive. And this can only be achived by the management learning how to control the subordinates in a very refined and sophisticated way. Give the subordinates power in relation to how much power they give back. You should not be satisified with getting good results and their loyalty. You should get an added control of abstract power. Let them handle it all and then force them to return the essence by:

• Let them propose a solution
• Let them define the solution
• Let them evaluate the solution
• But never allow them to proceed until they have explicitly defined how your transaction is formalized
• Develop agreements of the type that can be classified as loyalty

What should be documented in PKM

1. Only specific tasks are interesting, tacit examples or nobody will understand them afterwards
2. Only plans. Nobody documents after a thing is done. It should be documented as plans in the schema. How to do it all step by step or assumptions about what may happen. Each plan should have a reference to routines
3. The Boss only checks exceptions and does some random tests. S/he can also:
   1. change priority on measures
   2. tell people to write differently

Principles of using PKM as development of competences in an organisation

• You think as you act and you act as you think. Both are routines of behaviour
• Creativity is like any thinking at any level. It just happends to be in an area without any completed shell.
• You dream as you think. If you want your dreams to be free you must begin with allowing your thoughts to be free
• Accept where you are. Even if you are in a conflict
• Rules of thumb when you create a personal map of knowledge according to PKM:
  • Are all parts of the maps described
  • Are you on a domain independent level when you describe what you do. (No buzzwords). Are you general enough, no unique parts, only replacable parts
  • Synchronicity, use links rather than doubling of parts on the various maps
  • Flexibility, easy to add and easy to replace parts in the description

What a global PKM system in an organisation should consist of

• Competition, benchmarking and evaluation
• Automated evaluation, machine learning. Never work with old datamining. Design systems that processes ready made knowledge units in future databases. The learing cannot be subordinate to quantity.
• Standards, the core is universal
• Classification and storytelling, culture grows by success stories

How knowledge is used in organisations

Mental models in an organisation

When an organisation can produce a good overview of what they do then there is an increase in the employees ability to communicate. When the often talked about "shared vision" is replaced by an explicit frame of reference the organisation will become solid.

Knowledge companies

• Are selling models since people do not know how to create models. Most people are not used to reasoning on a high level of abstraction
• Knowledge companies usually need to make senior consultants into partners or else their consultants may walk away with their knowledge
• Knowledge companies will probably become more formalized in order to handle and capitalize on the complexity

The use of knowledge from a global perspective

• 70% of the population in Swedenb work with information processing
• The drawback are that to some extent people are sitting on a chair, watching a comuter screen. People can get sick of this
• Information processing is getting more efficient but the rest of society is not. We still drive a car with the weight 1.5 ton just to move around. Many people have several houses, etc..
• A paradox is that for many people the paradise would be a place where they could live peacefully in nature.

Available summeries of Swedish books

• Kommunikation på arbetplatsen
• Inlärningsrevolutionen
• Planeringssamtalet
• Kompetensutredingens delrapport

Science and art

• It should only be evaluating, never creative
• What cannot be measured is not Science
• Assign a new area as the leading edge. Designing of totallity. The artistic creation of consciousness. Creating of society. The creative science.

Group Knowledge Management

Groups deciding about which rules are valid and creating and voting for general rules

Competence development

• Competence is usually the type of tacit knowledge that can only be documented as experience. Competence is the sum of experience and learned knowledge in the form of theories and models
• Personal competence resides in a person. Organisational competence resides in the routines of the organisation.
• Competence profiles can be stored as a way to makes sure that people find the right persons for the right place

Consultancy Societies are based on commercial agreements between independent consultants:

• It starts as an agreement between few but grows to a society for marketing through certification
• A routinge for reward is established. This contains:
  • 10% of all to foundation
  • 20% to the seller
  • 30% directly if foundation sells it through administration
• A creation of support and education for all members. This contains:
  • We educate you
  • We certify you
  • We evaluate your work
  • We give a guareantee to the customer with fixed prices
  • We provide a complex system for upgrading an organisations system

Management and control systems

Management of organisations

• Elisabeth Moss Kantner showed that one management principle may be good at one moment and another management principle at another moment

Knowlege networks is based on

• A simple grammar
• A self explanatory standard
• Explicit relationships between all parts
• Consistency
• Domain independent headers

Compression of information

• References to Linné and Darwin
• How do you find the concepts that enables you to compress knowledge.
  • Create a system
  • Assign a name to it
  • Use it as a part in a larger or more abstract system

Knowledge transfer

Working knowledge

• knowledge transfer in discussions. Talk is the real work
• knowledge fairs, conferences
• knowledge should be everybodies business
• librarians
• Hewlett Pachard web-based system, indexed over five hundred firms by using CBRS for KM
• a good thesarus is the basic cue
• enforcing routines
• Descriptions of reports
  • Storing retrieving, comparing reports
  • How the bonus is calculated from the reports is a science in itself. Create a foundation for this.
• All reports are shared and open

Nancy Dixons descriptions of knowledge transfer

• near transfer
• serial transfer
• far transfer
• expert transfer

Communities of Practise

• Is created when people eat breakfast together at the company
• At IBM they claimed they saved time when everybody could eat their morning sandwich at the company
• Skapas när alla äter frukost tillsammans på företaget.

The role of the education for the development of competencies

• In Germany and in Japan they learn while working as apprentencies
• Another way to learn is to participate in the development of a product
• A third way is to participate in specifically designed courses.
• Are courses needed for the employees. Another strategy would be to promote those who learn on their free time. A higher salary can be claimed anyway

E-learning

e-Learning corresponds with Knowledge Management in many ways. The main difference is that e-learning often is focussed on AudioVisual programs for education.

Opportunities with e-learning

• The quality of the course-ware becomes better
• You need less resources to devbelop courses
• The students work more by themselves
• Teachers become tutors rather than information conveyers

Drawbacks with e-learning

• It is less personal
• It is often more difficult to search for knowledge than to get it through the spoken word

Well known applications of KM

IT - for Knowledge management

• Lesson learned processes
• Knowledge attic, Knowledge pump, Knowledge publisher, Knowledge pump
• Hierarchical search or search by content (keywords)
• Information filtering
  • cognitive
  • economic
  • social
• Micro och macrostructure in a document

Global KM

An intelligent searh engine will allow for the following type of search:

1. A word as an input => select relationship
2. Word - relationships => select subject or object for the relationship
3. A description of types of situations => select type of situation
   
   

How a general knowledge base may work

• Every problem can be perceived as a search problem
• You start with an interview
• The result from the interview is a profile
• The profile is matched with stored profiles
• The knowledge base grows

The Knowledge Management of Ernst & Young

Background
A large number of CEO's claimed that KM is one of the most 10 important challenges in the future.
KM is to create Human Capital, not only to measure it like Leif Edvinsson does

Why did KM fail
To much information is worse than no information. Nobody has yet managed to provide the essential knowledge to the one who needs it

Why KM
To increase profit
Create business

Total standardisation
In order to be able to index knowledge, structure knowledge, and search for knowledge

Which is the best source of knowledge
Begin with the material you have. Only written material like:

• Instructions
• Offers/Proposals
• Methods
• Templates
• Presentations
• Reports
• etc...

A simple way of creating and indexing a knowledge base
Assign the role of an internal help-desk to one person in the corporation who is an expert of searching for information in the corporation. This person creates a FAQ-database that contains:

• The keywords to all things that are related to the question
• The question itself
• Where the answer was found
• Who provided the answer (gives bonus)
• An extensive answer
• Statistics about how many persons in the corporation have read this answer
• Statistics about who has provided extenisve information about the answer (gives bonus)

The persons who calls the help-desk receives immediately a link to the help-desk pages via email in order to enable the questioner and the facilitator to view the same screen material when they continue their conversation

The knowledge Web of Ernst & Young
One storage many entrances

• People
• Sales, market material
• Leading practises
• Articles and publications
• Service and delivery
• Network and communications
• Regulations and technical standards
• Learning resources

Technical KM

Historical background of the technical perspective on KM

• It started around the 50-ies with operational research
• AI and Knowledge acquisition from 60 - 85
• BPR, Workflow, etc.. 80 - 95
• Data Warehouse and ERPS 85 - 2005
• Knowledge databases and KM, 90 - 2005
• Communities of Practise 2000 - ?
• Unified perspective 2005 -

Examples of complementary solutions

• Artificial Intelligence
• Full text search
• Standardized categories
• Object oriented approaches
• Associations of networks
• Data mining
• Machine learning

Maschine learning algorithms

• Mitchells "version spaces"
• Quinlans ID3 och induction tools
• Cluster analys

A summary of needed functions in a knowledge base

• Classifications in real time from the existing context
• Dynamic structures who are continuously restructuring themselves
• Multiple and parallell hierarchies
• Soft connections via semantical links
• Machine learning updating of data and automated reorganisations
• Storing all user responses
• Automated bookkeeping of user status and user rights

Administrative problems with knowledge

• Information is perishable
• Uppdating is always a problem
• Bureaucracy, degenerating structures
• Alienation
• An accelerating chaos

Structuring knowledge

Why is it necessary to have some simple global standard for how to represent knowledge?

• overview of knowledge
• cognitive consistency
• decision theory claims that you need to group alternatives to be able to choose

In the area of system design you always follow one single standard for representing parts of the organisation. Why is this difficult with knowledge?

• Each model has a limited area of appliccability
• There are as many models as there are perspectives on reality
• You can formalize the processes for storing products but it is much more difficult to formalize abstract ambiguous structures

Historical organisation theory about structuring of complexity

Toqueville, Durkheim. Sub-optimization creates a shadow organisation.

• Functional
• Processes
• Products
• Markets
• Gegraphical
• Matrix combinations of the above

Alternative perspectives on structuring information

• Formalizing information in order to adjust it to an established system
• Creating a philosophy to manage the organisation from principles
• Sociology and psychology as heuristic sets of principles
• Centralise or decentralise. Centralise rules and decentralise operative responsability
• Top-down or delegation
• Total integration or free units

Whatever structure select you need to aquire information from all parts of the organisation

• In the future all organisations must be flexible, distributed, virtual and being able to adjust to new circumstances quickly
• Organisations need new types of control systems in relation to losing the old types of control systems
• The bottle neck is to get an overview of large quantities of information
• One needs methods for structuring large quantities of information and knowledge
• There should be no fixed structure of the knowledge but rather a possibility to restructure it automatically

Bottom-up or Top-down structuring

Top down:

• is faster
• is more simple
• is more safe
• is more secure
• creates a consistent map
• may constrain reality (only what fits in can be used)

Bottom Up

• may be the only possible way when there is no structure
• is necessary in an initial phase when there is no structure
• promotes creativity

Various types of symbolic representation of structures

• Procedural graphs
• Flow charts
• Jackson Structured Programming
• Conceptual schemas and graphs
• Database schema
• V-graphs
• Semantic networks
• Context diagram
• Content lists
• Index of contents by keywords

Problems with structuring computer programs

• To store all data locally gives security but makes it all very inefficient
• To store data globally makes it all much more easy
• Comlex structures or simple structures
• Modularization may create redundancy an inefficiency
• Object orientation. ABB took away all their 12 levels of management and increased efficiency 50%

Before the structuring can begin

• Classify all parts
• Sort them
• Redesign each class
• Group classes
• Relate classes to each other
• Create super classes

Problems with unique knowledge structures and unique schemas

• You miss the possibility to standardize
• You create redundancy in the database
• When you reach a certain size it becomes impossible to administrate

Standard Representations

The advantages with a simple standard representation

• Everyone understands it
• It is easy to update
• It is easy to learn

Models

All models are models of living systems with a purpose. We may call them business ideas
Every such model has two diffferent ways of describing their aims. Eithre they aim at a target state or at increasing/enlarging a state

Ontology

All knowledge should be indexed as routines at various levels

• History, why needed
• Beginning, how it works on primitive levels
• Growth cycle: incrementally created
• Formalisation, how turned into work flow measures

All knowledge should be transformed into domain independent knowledge
No knowledge should be implemented

Levels of Knowledge

The knowledge growth loop

From explicit to tacit

From decisions and descriptions of explicit knowledge
into automated tacit knowledge.
Is via:

1. Patterns
2. Goals
3. Subgoals
4. Processes
5. Subprocesses
6. and so on, until there is a work breakdown structure WBS

To organise the knowledge is via

1. Restructure relations
2. Regroup and reconsider it all

Problems with reusing knowledge

How do you solve the conflict with employees starting their own company

• Make them partners
• Let them sign binding contracts

How do you solve the problem with the most competent expert being a bad boss

• You have two parallell bosses. One for the business and another for the product development

The usability of methods and theories

• Methods create bureaucrazy
• Learning organizations cannot be managed by reason in a top-down way. They cannot be managed at all. They can only be breeded
• Only control them by general principles. As long as your profit can be measured

Future questions

• Is it possible to take away all management by hte use of IT
• Will IT balance the world and reduce the risk of international conflicts