Introduction | Definition | Motivation | Difficulties | Methods | External Links

Introduction

Enterprises are realising how important it is to "know what they know" and be able to make maximum use of the knowledge. This is their corporate knowledge asset. These knowledge assets reside in many different places such as: databases, knowledge bases, filing cabinets and peoples' heads and are distributed right across the enterprise. All too often one part of an enterprise repeats work of another part simply because it is impossible to keep track of, and make use of, knowledge in other parts. Enterprises need to know:

• what their corporate knowledge assets are;
• how to manage and make use of these assets to get maximum return.

Most traditional company policies and controls focus on the tangible assets of the company and leave unmanaged their important knowledge assets.

Definition

Knowledge assets are the knowledge regarding markets, products, technologies and organisations, that a business owns or needs to own and which enable its business processes to generate profits.

Knowledge management involves the identification and analysis of available and required knowledge, and the subsequent planning and control of actions to develop knowledge assets so as to fulfil organisational objectives.

Why is Knowledge Management Important

The success of businesses in the 1990's in an increasingly competitive marketplace depends critically on the quality of knowledge which those organisations apply to their key business processes. For example the supply chain depends on knowledge of diverse areas including raw materials, planning, manufacturing and distribution. Likewise product development requires knowledge of consumer requirements, new science, new technology, marketing etc.

The challenge of deploying the knowledge assets of an organisation to create competitive advantage becomes more crucial as:

• The marketplace is increasingly competitive and the rate of innovation is rising, so that knowledge must evolve and be assimilated at an ever faster rate.
• Corporations are organising their businesses to be focused on creating customer value. Staff functions are being reduced as are management structures. There is a need to replace the informal knowledge management of the staff function with formal methods in customer aligned business processes.
• Competitive pressures are reducing the size of the workforce which holds this knowledge.
• Knowledge takes time to experience and acquire. Employees have less and less time for this.
• There are trends for employees to retire earlier and for increasing mobility, leading to loss of knowledge.
• There is a need to manage increasing complexity as small operating companies a re trans-national sourcing operations.
• A change in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area. A subsequent reversal in policy may then lead to a renewed requirement for this knowledge, but the employees with that knowledge may no longer be there.
  

Why is Knowledge Management Difficult

There are many problems associated with finding out these knowledge assets and being able to use them in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Enterprises need:

• to have an enterprise-wide vocabulary to ensure that the knowledge is correctly understood;
• to be able to identify, model and explicitly represent their knowledge;
• to share and re-use their knowledge among differing applications for various types of users; this implies being able to share existing knowledge sources and also future ones.

Knowledge engineering methods and tools have come a long way towards addressing the use of a company's knowledge assets. They provide disciplined approaches to designing and building knowledge-based applications. There are tools to support the capture, modelling, validation, verification and maintenance of the knowledge in these applications. However these tools do not extend to supporting the processes for managing corporate knowledge.

However, we believe that the knowledge modelling techniques that exist to support the use of the knowledge, along with traditional physical assets management techniques, provide a starting point to manage fully the knowledge assets within a company.

How to Manage Knowledge

A leading expert in Knowledge Management, Karl Wiig, described three "pillars" for knowledge management: survey and categorise knowledge; appraise and evaluate value of knowledge; and synthesise knowledge related activities. Recent work from the University of Amsterdam (Robert van der Speck and Robert de Hoog) increased this to four, focusing on the activities of conceptualising, reflecting, specifying and reviewing.

Knowledge management covers the following:

• identifying what knowledge assets a company possesses
  • Where is the knowledge asset?
  • What does it contain?
  • What is its use?
  • What form is it in?
  • How accessible is it?
• analysing how the knowledge can add value
  • What are the opportunities for using the knowledge asset?
  • What would be the effect of its use?
  • What are the current obstacles to its use?
  • What would be its increased value to the company?
• specifying what actions are necessary to achieve better usability & added value
  • How to plan the actions to use the knowledge asset?
  • How to enact actions?
  • How to monitor actions?
• reviewing the use of the knowledge to ensure added value
  • Did the use of it produce the desired added value?
  • How can the knowledge asset be maintained for this use?
  • Did the use create new opportunities?
    

External Links

Websites | Applications | Tools | References | Mailing lists | Events

Websites

Below are sites that include many references and links to electronic KM resources:

• The international knowledge management network site, some interesting news and information, it used to be just an ftp site with position papers but it was updated to a web site in summer '96. Established by CIBIT and the University of Amsterdam
• The knowledge management forum site, another interesting site that users can contribute their position papers on the subject. It also has a good reference page with abstracts.
• Knowledge management server at the University of Texas at Austin - this has been re-vamped and is very informative with a good publications page and case study pages.
• Dr. Karl E. Sveiby knowledge management web site at Queensland University of Technology - it references the "tango" a non-computerised business simulation for knowledge management.
• Knowledge Management web site with alot of useful information.
  

Applications & Research

• Work carried out at AIAI on the Enteprise Project providing a framework for enterprise modelling and integration.
• Enterprise related work at other sites
• A collaborative project involving the NWAIAG and supported by the ERDF, SRB and DTI, which aims to address the problems associated with Knowledge Management and provide help and support for companies who want to manage this asset.
• Report on work at George Washington University on OKAM Organisational Knowledge Asset Management.
• UCSF Knowledge Management's Web server which lists some of the internal projects being undertaken at the University.
• Ikarus is an experimental knowledge management project with a World Wide Web interface that uses Netscape 3 or Internet Explore. It is being undertaken by the Language Analysis & Knowledge Engineering (LAKE) Group Department of Computer Science, University of Ottawa.
• Code4 (Conceptually Oriented Description Environment) is a general purpose knowledge management project intended for analysing, debugging, and delivering knowledge about some domain. It is being undertaken by Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Ottawa

Tools

There are very few tools providing a truly integrated set of functions to support the tasks associated with knowledge management. The following lists some tools that have been used to support various aspect of managing knowledge:

• Knowledge Capture:
  • PC PACK is a portable package of integrated tools for requirements and knowledge engineering.
  • Clementine Data Mining (or Knowledge Discovery) Software package from ISL
  • Intelligent Miner another data mining tool this time from IBM
  • The Information Discovery System (IDIS) a data mining tool from Information Discovery.
• Knowledge Sharing:
  • ART*Enterprise - object-oriented client/server tool with case-based retrieval of both structured and unstructured information from Brightware
  • GrapeVINE - two versions one for lotus notes and one for Netscape in which users can set up an interest profile that identifies what is useful to them and so filter information.
  • Knowledger Software - two products PKM (the Personal Knowledge Manager) and PDP (the Personal Development Plan) both based on Lotus Notes.
  • Knowledge Xchange - TM Knowledge Management System - a Lotus Notes based system, the current users are Andersen Consulting professionals.
    

References

• Journal of Universal Computer Science (Special Issue on IT for Knowledge Management), 3 (8), 1997, Springer-Verlag. (To be reprinted in: Borghoff, U.M. and Pareschi, R., (Eds.), Information Technology for Knowledge Management. Springer-Verlag, 1998)
• ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort public library.
• Some management science references on managing knowledge creation.
• Intranet/Knowledge Management Resource Center a good publications reference site
• Karl M Wiig; books published and distributed by Schema Press, 5211 Vicksburg Dr, Arlington, TX 76017; Fax (817) 478-1048; Email 71117,1427@compuserve.com The 3 volumes are:
  • Volume 1; Knowledge Management Foundations, Thinking about thinking, How people and organisations create, represent and use knowledge; ISBN 0-9638925-0-9
  • Volume 2; Knowledge Management, The central focus for intelligent-acting organisations; ISBN 0-9638925-1-7
  • Volume 3; Knowledge Management methods, Practical approaches to managing knowledge; ISBN 0-9638925-2-5
• Summary of results of an AIAI 1994 survey describing the major computer-based projects being undertaken to support the more effective use of corporate knowledge - now quite dated but still has some useful links.
  

Events

• 2-Day Course on Knowledge Management, organised by AIAI, Edinburgh, being held on June 8 and 9, 1998
• PAKeM98 First International Conference on The Practical Application of Knowledge Management Monday 23rd March - Wednesday 25th March 1998, London, UK
• Knowledge Management and Knowledge Distribution through the Internet at KAW'98 being held on April 18-23, 1998
• The KBO (Knowledge-Based Organizations ) Conference on The Future of Product Development, Manufacturing and Selling being held on May 11 - 13, 1998 in San Diego, CA

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Last updated 23rd February 1998
by Ann Macintosh