BIS4225.

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Knowledge
Management

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 Reading Materials
Liebowitz and Wilcox
(1997).

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 Data and Information
What is DATA?
Raw facts that do not have context,
without useful meaning.
What is INFORMATION?
Facts that have context, interpreted
with useful meaning for a particular
task.
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 What is Knowledge?
You turn information into
knowledge when you
uncover associations and
regularities between
information items.

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 What is Knowledge?
Knowledge is a set of beliefs,
expertise, experiences, and
assumptions that the human mind
uses to form causal relationships
between phenomena, and assign
meaning to data in order to generate
information.
(Sanchez and Heene, 1997; Marquardt and Kearsley, 1999).
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 What is Knowledge?
Knowledge can be created when
people combine or form new
relationships between previously
known knowledge through inductive
reasoning.
(Wiig, 1997)

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 What is Knowledge?
Knowledge is complex.
Its production usually
requires more complex
processing than mere
tabulation or algorithmic
tabulation.

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 Knowledge Management
Organizations grow and
evolve by virtue of the
knowledge that they
manage to accumulate and
utilize.

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 Knowledge Management
The concept of knowledge
management is to acquire, codify,
develop, and store the
organizations knowledge, and
disseminate it to individuals for
the benefit of the organization as
a whole.
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 Organizational Knowledge
Tacit Knowledge:
The personal knowledge of an
individual that is usually not clearly
expressed.
Based on taught skills and
experience, and covers personal
belief, perspective, and values.
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 Organizational Knowledge
Explicit Knowledge:
Knowledge that is clearly expressed.
In businesses, such knowledge is
routinely collected, stored, and
distributed as management
information.

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Organizational Knowledge
Knowledge is:
hard to identify,
difficult to value, document, and
deploy,
continuously evolving.

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 Technologies for KM
Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Can machines exhibit

intelligent behaviour?
The quest to make machines
fully intelligent has not
been fruitful.
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 Technologies for KM
Knowledge-Based Systems
(KBS):
A computer program with a limited
amount of knowledge about a
particular task or domain, so that the
program can answer a limited
number of questions about that task
or domain.

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 Technologies for KM
Knowledge-Based Systems
(KBS):
Computer-based systems that
embody aspects of human knowledge
in domains such as game-playing
(chess), theorem-proving, etc.

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 Technologies for KM
Expert Systems (ES):
Computer-based systems that
capture aspects of an experts
competent performance in relatively
narrow domain of expertise (such as
chemical analysis or fault diagnosis).

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 Technologies for KM
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
systems:
are not algorithmic in nature (the
logic of their operations are rarely
expressed in conventional
procedural style programming),
do not guarantee a correct answer.

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 Other Techniques
Neural Networks:
Artificial intelligence that attempts to simulate
the way a human brain works on a computer. It
works by creating connections between
processing elements (equivalent to neurons).
Neural networks are particularly effective for predicting
events when the networks have a large database of prior
examples to draw on.
Used in voice and image recognition systems.

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 Other Techniques
Fuzzy Logic:
Logic that recognizes more than simple
true and false values. Propositions can
be represented with degrees of
truthfulness and falsehood.
Example: the statement, today is sunny, might be 100%
true if there are no clouds, 80% true if there are a few
clouds, 50% true if it's hazy, and 0% true if it rains all day.
Used in Spelling Checkers.
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 Other Techniques
Genetic Algorithms:
Genetic algorithms are inspired
by Darwin's theory on evolution.
It is a model of machine learning
which derives its behaviour from
a metaphor of some of the
mechanisms of evolution in
nature.
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 Other Techniques
Intelligent Agents:
Programs, used extensively on the
Web to perform tasks such as
retrieving and delivering information
and automating repetitive tasks.
Some intelligent agents are also used as
tools to track Web navigation behaviour.
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 Managing Knowledge
Needs:
A set of policies and formal
management.
Involvement of whole organization
and knowledge-sharing culture.
Roles and fundamental tasks of
managing organizational
knowledge.
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 Learning
Learning refers to the process
that changes the state of
knowledge of an individual or an
organization.
(Sanchez and Heene, 1997)

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 Learning Organization
A learning organization is one that
creates and supports learning among
its employees, for example, through:
the establishment of a corporate learning
culture, and
an information and knowledge structure
that supports learning at all levels of the
organization.

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