Article 3- KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

What is Knowledge Management?
Before we step into Knowledge Management, we must know what is the term knowledge and management. Knowledge is defined as information that has been organised and analysed to make it understandable and applicable to problem solving or decision making according to Turban (1992).

Knowledge consists of truth and beliefs, perspectives, concepts, judgements, expectations, methodologies according to Wiig (1993).

Management is defined as the strategy-driven motivation and facilitation of people, aimed at reaching an organisation's set goals according to Roelof & Beijerse (1999).
But this view can change from person to person according to the situation. Knowledge Management is defined by our guru’s are stated below:

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Knowledge Management doesn’t have finite definition, but Knowledge Management can be comprises of Term Work, Motivation, Experience, Storage and Transferring from person to another .When I consider Term work; one must valuate the members of the team either by winning or loosing, this approach is towards learning and the encouragement of sharing and co-operative workers stated by Richard Potter (2007) and Colin Armistead (1999)

When I consider Motivation, Knowledge management helps to achieve the goal through the strategy-driven motivation and thus it helps to develop the worker given by Roelof P.uit Beijerse (1999)

Knowledge Management is also known for sharing one’s store the knowledge through experience which helps each other to work more effectively to meet business and personal objective for the overall success stated by David Gurteen (2006) and Karl M. Wiig (1997).This knowledge can be forwarded to wisdom for some individual according to Karen Battersby(2007)

REFLECTION FROM PRACTICE
I think data, information and knowledge are co related, from the above definition, I think Knowledge Management doesn’t have a finite definition but it comprise of experience, storage, term work and encouragement to peoples to work in organisation for a example When I was doing my undergraduate, during the third year when we were preparing for campus interview, we were asked to be divided into groups for around 4 to 5 peoples doing activities such as aptitude, logical reasoning, GD, personal interview. We do our assigned work for one week and then share with others in the next week; we teach others what we learn. In my point of view this means the knowledge is shared among all the students in the class to make it easy for everyone in the class to address the problem more effectively in the real interview. When we consider as an organisation point of view the individual class collects all the shared material documents and is placed in a repository for all the individual members to access the information and make the best use of it. This repository keeps growing every year and it becomes the knowledge bank to reduce time digging each time into the problem and also gives an idea of the types of questions and the starting point to answer. In my perspective, this is called knowledge management, the process of gathering information from groups of individuals and placing it in a repository to be accessed and utilized by individuals to solve their questions.

REFERENCE
[1] Charles Despres and Daniele Chauvel (1999),"Knowledge Management", journal of knowledge management volume3, no2, pp.113
[2] Colin Armistead (1999),"Knowledge Management and process performance”, Journal of Knowledge Management vol. 3, no2, pp 143-154
[3] Roelof P.,and Beijerse,U.(1999)."Questions in knowledge management: defining and conceptualizing a phenomenon", Journal of knowledge management, vol. 3 No.2, pp 94-109
[4] Turban,E(1992). Expert Systems and Applied Artificial Intelligence. Macmillan
[5]Yogesh Malhotra (2005),"Integrating Knowledge management technologies inorganisational business processes: getting real time enterprises to deliver real business performance", journal of knowledge management vol. 9, no 1, pp 7-28
[6] Wiig,K.M. (1993). Knowledge Management Foundations: Thinking How People and Organisation Create, Represent, and Use Knowledge. Schema Press, Arlington, TX.
[7] Wiig, K.M (1997),"Knowledge Management: An Introduction and Perspective", the journal of knowledge management vol. 1, no 1, pp. 1-8

Article 2- KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT MODEL-SECI

According to Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995), knowledge creation process is more effective, and divided into 3 elements: (1) SECI; (2) Ba and (3) Knowledge Assets
The above 3 elements interact with each other in the organisation which helps to share their tacit knowledge in a spiral format, Nonaka gave more importance to Japanese because they are the creator of new knowledge. In this article, I focus on the first two elements.

SECI
Socialization: the sharing of tacit knowledge between individuals through joint activities, physical proximity.
Externalization: the expression of tacit knowledge in publicly comprehensible forms.
Combination: the conversion of explicit knowledge into more complex sets of explicit knowledge: communication, dissemination, systematization of explicit knowledge.
Internalization: the conversion of externalized knowledge into tacit knowledge on an individual or organizational scale. The embodiment of explicit knowledge into actions, practices, processes and strategic initiatives.
BA
It helps to share the contents of the knowledge; this is popularly used in Japan to improve their tacit knowledge
Originating Ba: It is same of socialization; it enables interaction with each other.
Dialoguing Ba: It is used to dialogue the tacit knowledge of the individuals
Systemizing Ba: The storage of tacit knowledge to local storage.
Exercising Ba: All the information stored are improved to the benefit of the organisation

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Socialization: The transformation of tacit to tacit knowledge, which mean personal knowledge is processed by other according to McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999) and Maen Al-Hawari (2004).

Externalisation: The transformation of tacit to explicit knowledge, which mean formalised way of converting personal knowledge into procedures and figures according to McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999) and Maen Al-Hawari (2004).

Internalisation: The transformation of explicit to tacit knowledge, which means the individual knowledge are translated into theory of practice according to McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999) and Maen Al-Hawari (2004).

Combination: The transforamtion of explicit to explicit knowledge, which means the combination of all the existing theories into specific one according to McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999) and Maen Al-Hawari (2004).

According to McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999), under the knowledge category there are two models namely Boisot’s model and Intellectual Capital model, where Boisot’s model is considered as knowledge as either codified (knowledge that can be easily transmitted at reason) or uncodified (knowledge that cannot be easily transmitted at reason), and as diffused (knowledge is easily shared from one another) or undiffused (knowledge that is not shared from one another), within an organisation. He finally states this model is mechanistic and more consistent. The intellectual capital(IC) model can be separated into human, customer, process and growth elements which are contained in two main categories of human capital and structural/organisation capital.

Socially constructed models of KM assume a wide definition of knowledge and views knowledge can be linked with social and learning processes within the organisation (McAdam R and McCreedy S, 1999).

REFLECTION FROM PRACTICE
In my view SECI model can be classified as; Socialization is sharing of knowledge between two individuals, it’s just like spend time or living with colleagues. Externalization is peer to peer network, It involves sharing of individual knowledge are committed into group and then represented in group according to nonaka (1995), the sum of individual intension and ideas fuse and became integrated with group mental world, the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge can be done in two factors as follows; converting knowledge as image, figure, concepts and words and converting knowledge as customer understandable form. Combination is a group to group network, conversion of knowledge in the organisation into complex set of knowledge, this is done by capturing information then presenting and then reporting it. Internalization involves converting of explicit to tacit knowledge; this requires how individuals are contributed to the organisation.

For example if we consider a MNC company, there are different department doing different project, assume, the project term consists of 6 members it also act as an organisation, when peoples chat with each other this is known as socialization then when we are processing a project we are in need of team meeting, all the members in the term contribute as a individual but the information on the whole come out as group then it is called externalization, when the decision about the project is captured and documented in the form of report it is called combination finally when the project is finished and given to other organisation is called Internalization.
Now let us connect SECI model with Earl 7 school Earl (2001), when we compare the above example, MNC company with 7 school, I feel it connected to all the three main categories namely; Technocratic, Commercial and Behaviour schools because the technology or the coding used to complete the project is under the technocratic school, the statistical information gathered for the success of the project comes under Behaviour school and finally the market share is termed as Commercial school.

But now I have a doubt how SECI model is been used in practise, if it is used who is responsible to implement it? The concept of knowledge storing is not acceptable due to ego between many people’s therefore it is difficult to convert tacit to explicit. When I consider other two models namely; Boisot’s model and intellectual capital(IC) model, it is also not easy to transfer knowledge. Therefore in my view models should not be adapted it should be created depending upon the organisation and their employees for the better investment.

REFERENCE
[1] Ackoff, 1989, retrieved from http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm[accessed on 4th February, 2009]

[2] Earl M. (2001),”Knowledge Management Strategies: Toward a Taxonomy”, Journal of Management Information Systems. 18, (1), p.215-233. [Available at http://staffweb.ncnu.edu.tw/hyshih/download/KM/Paper/KM%20strategy%20taxonomy.pdf, accessed on 30th January, 2009]

[3] McAdam R. and McCreedy S. (1999),”A critical review of knowledge management models. The Learning Organization”: An International Journal, vol.6, no.3, pp.91-101 accessed on 3rd February, 2009.

[4] Maen Al-Hawari(2004),"Knowledge Management Styles and Performance: a Knowledge Space Model From both Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives”, The university of Wollongong. pp.31-36, 40-59 [available at http://www.library.uow.edu.au/adt-NWU/uploads/approved/adt-NWU20050308.141504/public/02Whole.pdf, accessed on 1st feb,2009]

[5] Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press [accessed on 2nd February, 2009]

[6] SECI MODEL, Retrieved from http://www.12manage.com/methods_nonaka_seci.html [accessed on 2nd February, 2009]

Article1- DATA,INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE

Data, Information and Knowledge is the most confusing terms in Knowledge Management. In my view data and information go hand in hand. In simple words it takes the same meaning, but this can change from person to person and also depends on how they view it for a particular situation in an organisation.

Stenmark (2002) has clearly described data, information and knowledge are linear and one directed. In my observation data is a raw fact or figure which serves no purpose but when the fact is processed it is represented as information and when this is used in oneself it is known as knowledge.

Knowledge can be sub divided as external and internal or explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is the knowledge that have been captured and stored in computer environments may be shared by applications and users. example: storing of employment information in the database for the future reference of the organisation (Richard C. Hicks; Ronald Dattero; Stuart D. Galup, 2007).Tacit knowledge is the knowledge needed to select an appropriate computer program, data set, sequence of functions to perform, output, and analysis within yourself (Richard C. Hicks; Ronald Dattero; Stuart D. Galup, 2007).Let us see below how the guru’s of Knowledge Management describes about the 3 terms:

REFLECTION FROM PRACTICE
According to the research, there is no clear definition for the 3 terms. As I have stated in the earlier data, information and knowledge are more interactive with each other. In order to gain knowledge you are in need of data and information without which you cannot process it. This process can be explained well with an example: I had completed my under graduate in May, 2008 and I was placed in a top MNC company, suddenly when I saw a advertisement about Middlesex University, London in the newspaper it was like a data, then when I started searching about it and knowing what are the courses available and which will choose me it started to become information and then now it is changed to knowledge because this is not just the stepping stone of my career but I am learning a lot in a multicultural environment. The knowledge was shared with my friends and my undergrad university. These lead many students come to Middlesex University to pursue their masters. Thus the knowledge is used by everyone for good.

REFERENCE
[1] Beijerse R. P. (1999), “Questions in knowledge management: defining and conceptualising a phenomenon”, Journal of Knowledge Management Vol. 3 No. 2 1999. pp. 94-109 [accessed on 17th January, 2009]

[2] Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995), The Knowledge Creating Company, Oxford University Press, New York, NY [accessed on 18th January, 2009].

[3] Nereu F.Kock Jr, Robert J.Mc Queen, Megan Baker, "Learning and process Improvement in knowledge organisations: A critical analysis of four contemporary Myths", pp 1-10 [accessed on 21st January, 2009].

[4] Richard C.Hicks, Ronald Dattero and Stuart D.Galup (2007),"A Metaphor for knowledge management: explicit islands in a tacit sea", journal of knowledge management, vol.11, no.1, pp 5-16 [Accessed on 16th January, 2009].

[5] Stenmark D. (2002), “Information vs. Knowledge: The Role of Intranets in Knowledge Management”, Proceedings of the IEEE 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences [accessed on 20th January, 2009].

[6] Wiig, K. M (1993)., Knowledge Management Foundations: Thinking About Thinking – How People and Organization Create, Represent, and Use Knowledge, Schema Press, Arlington, TX.[accessed on 18th January, 2009].

[7] Wilson, T.D. (2002),”The nonsense of Knowledge Management”, Information Research, vol. 8, no. 1, [Available at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0112&L=know-org&P=R224&I=-3, accessed on 20th January, 2009].

LEARNING SOURCE KNOWLEDGE MODEL

According to Nonaka, knowledge model can be classified as
(http://www.citehr.com/977-frame-works-knowledge-management.html)

Socialization: the sharing of tacit knowledge between individuals through joint activities, physical proximity.

Externalization: the expression of tacit knowledge in publicly comprehensible forms.

Combination: the conversion of explicit knowledge into more complex sets of explicit knowledge: communication, dissemination, systematization of explicit knowledge.

Internalization: the conversion of externalized knowledge into tacit knowledge on an individual or organizational scale. The embodiment of explicit knowledge into actions, practices, processes and strategic initiatives.

My view in Knowledge Models

knowledge creation can be done by two types of knowledge namely tacit and explicit knowledge, Tacit knowledge is sharing of individual knowledge to others and Explicit knowledge is sharing of knowledge from any storage devices and distributed to others


SOCIALIZATION
It involves the sharing of knowledge between two individuals, this get together can be done when we spend time or living with colleagues.
example: Team meeting in an organisation required for the productivity.

EXTERNALIZATION
It is peer to peer network,It involves sharing of individual knowledge are commited into group and then represented in group or else according to nonka, the sum of individual intension and ideas fuse and became integrated with group mwntal world.The conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge can be done in two factors as follows
a)Converting knowledge as image,figure,concepts and words.
b)Converting knowledge as customer understandable form.
example: group coursework or our buffalo organisation in KM module

COMBINATION
It is a group to group network.Conversion of knowledge in the organisation into complex set of knowledge.this is done by capturing information then presenting and then reporting it.
example: preparation of drugs

INTERNALIZATION
It involes converting of explicit to tacit knowledge, this requires how individuals is contributed to the organisation.

REFERENCE:

[1] http://www.citehr.com/977-frame-works-knowledge-management.html[accessed on 3rd february 2009]

[2]KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT by Ikiyiro Nonaka[accessed on 1st february,2009]