Rewarding the representation of reusable knowledge

The successful completion of this assignment corresponds to 2 credits

Five types of assignment work

In order to allow the students a maximum flexibility they can chose which type of assignment work they will make as long as it is deals with rewarding personnel for contributing (or punishing them for not contributing) reusable knowledge to the organisation. The type of assignment work should be related to the theories assigned to the group. The following are examples of types of solutions to the assignment. They are presented in ranked order of difficulty where the easiest are presented first and the most difficult in the end:

1. Analyse the theories within the area of knowledge management that is assigned to the group and to you (See column 3) and create the "organisational software" for implementing the theories in an organisation. If it is possible then some part of the implementation should deal with the measurement of the contribution of knowledge.
2. Interview individual knowledge workers at an organisation in order to create measures for any type of activity that the worker does, that contributes to the long term strategic goals of the organisation
3. Find any kind of "community of practice" (This is described at lecture 1), and analyse how the behaviour of individuals can be recognized and measured in order to promote the growth and quality of work within the community
4. One of the group members will be selected as coordinator and this person will make a general description and index of all the contributions from the other group members
5. Transform the knowledge in a process or method (or pattern or ritual) in an organisation into a set of principles (rational heuristics) that will make it more generally applicable and more efficient to communicate

Requirements on your assignment

The assignment must fulfill the following requirements:

• It must the relate to the theories that was assigned to the group
• It must relate to the acquisition and reuse of knowledge or to the transfer of knowledge between individuals
• It must be as explicit as possible. This means that the student must try to avoid methods and processes and instead transform the knowledge to heuristics
• It must be feasible to measure the outcome of the proposed processes or strategies
• It must be possible for the student to document the results on his/her homepage with such high quality that any other student will be able to understand the contents of the homepage
• The acquired knowledge must be considered as useful or reusable
• It must be presented in a certain standardised way in order to allow all other students to reuse the knowledge. See requirements below

Requirements on what each individual must do as an assignment

Each individual student must create a homepage where the results of the assignment is presented. In order to facilitate the reuse of the knowledge it must conform to the provided standard. The students homepage must contain at the most four levels of pages and at least two levels of pages:

1. A graphical map describing the network structure of the represented knowledge. This must satisfy a number of quality requirements
2. Tables of knowledge for comparing lists or attribute vectors
3. Ordered lists of contents of knowledge
   1. Steps, ranked in order of priority or sorted in any kind of order
   2. Thesis described as a vector of attribute-values
4. Free text descriptions of the details of the knowledge

What if the theories that are assigned to the group are not well suited for any of the five types of assignments
It may be that the theories assigned to a group are so specific that some group member feel that the theories are not well suited for the type of assignment work that he/she wants to do. In such a case this person is allowed to extend the area of theories until it suits the types of assignments that the participant want to do. If this is done it must be explicitly motivated at the homepage.

Requirements for passing the examination of the assignment

• Your assignment results may be presented as only three web-pages but in such a case they must be of very high quality. If your assignment is of medium or low quality you may have to write as much as 20 web-pages in order to pass the exam
• It must be possible for any non-expert user to understand the content of the represented knowledge
• At the final exam the student must be able to provide examples showing how the represented knowledge is reusable
• The knowledge should be useful for more than three persons in an organisation

What each group must do as an assignment

Each group must analyse the contents of each homepage of all its group members. The group is responsible for the quality of each of its participants homepages.
Each group must deliver a written report to the teachers that describe its evaluation of each individual homepage. This must be handed in at the latest 25/5. If the group fails to analyse any homepage this group will not pass the assignment but has to do an extra assignment.

The group is not responsible for any member that does not contribute to the work. If the group expels a group member that does not contribute to the group then:

• The group is not responsible for this individual anymore
• The work of the individual student will only be examined by the teacher and if this work is of poor quality the student will be assigned another work where the student can prove that s/he can apply the theories in practice.

Examples of steps in your work

• Acquire knowledge through literature studies or through interviews
• Analyse the knowledge
• Classify each part
• Structure the classified parts
• Design a structure
• Create a consistent index for the details of the knowledge
• Create visual representations of knowledge structures