Business Consulting > Knowledge Management

What is Knowledge?

"Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed expertise, values, contextual information and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates from and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices and norms." Davenport & Prusak, 1998, Working Knowledge, HBP

In other words, knowledge is not just a collection of data. Data in context becomes information, and Information with guidelines on how to use it Knowledge.

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What is Knowledge Management?

Steve Barth on DestinationKM.com defines Knowledge Management as "knowledge management refers to strategies and structures for maximizing the return on intellectual and information resources. Because intellectual capital resides both in tacit form (human education, experience and expertise) and explicit form (documents and data), KM depends on both cultural and technological processes of creation, collection, sharing, recombination and reuse. The goal is to create new value by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of individual and collaborative knowledge work while increasing innovation and sharpening decision-making."

How do you best combine all of the data, information and expertise into a base and then make it available for members of your organization to share and receive benefits from it. This is the task of Knowledge Management.

Douglas Weidner in a paper entitled "Using Connect and Collect to Achieve the KM Endgame" considers the knowledge process to consist of 3 parts
  • Knowledge Acquisition - The process of capturing for later use raw material, unvalidated knowledge, such as training, books and other hard copy, Information from browsing the web, etc.
  • Knowledge Production - The process of validating the raw acquired knowledge, creating new knowledge from it.
  • Knowledge Integration - The process of organizing and transforming it into written material or a knowledge base for instant access, exposing and sharing it with other's in the organization while convincing them of it's validity.
Knowledge management really means managing this process not just the knowledge. Mr. Weidner considers this task to be 2 parts
  • Connect- Promote collaboration of those who contribute and create new knowledge to the knowledge base.
  • Collect - facilitating the creation and maintenance of the knowledge base.
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How can Technology aid Knowledge Management?

Connect and collect relates to making available to the organization both tacit knowledge, experience and understanding of the people in the organization, and explicit Knowledge such as documents and reports. Being able to transform one into the other is key. A. D. Marwick in article on IBM.com considers technology that supports the four variations possible for transformation of this type of knowledge
  1. Tacit to tacit - The "shared formation and communication of tacit knowledge between people, e.g., in meetings"
    Supporting Technologies
    • Conference Calls (Voice/Video)
    • E-Meetings - Video and text based conferencing
    • Chat/Instant Messaging
  2. Tacit to Explicit - "The conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge (externalization) involves forming a shared mental model, then articulating through dialog."
    Supporting Technologies
    • Forums/News Groups
    • Documentation tools
    • Content Management systems
    • Business Process Management tools that incorporate knowledge in repeatable processes and methodologies
  3. Explicit to Explicit - This area is best supported by technology and involves several different processes
    • Knowledge Capture - This area would include the transformation of books, speech even video artifacts into a digital form with an organizing principle, such as the ingestion of unstructured data into an XML repository or a database.
      Supporting Technologies
      • Extraction tools, that can extract text from multiple digital formats
      • OCR tools that can convert scanned images of physical artifacts to text
      • Word processors that allow dictation to be turned into documents
      • Speech Recognition that can covert the spoken word to a digital file.
      • Ingestion into indexed storage as in a database, content management system, asset management system, etc.
    • Search - The action that allows the user to find the stored knowledge that is most relevant to their needs
      Supporting Technologies
      • Key word search engines utilizing relevance, synonyms, homonyms, stemming, etc.
      • Concept based searching
      • Web spidering and indexing of site pages.
    • Taxonomies and document classification - "Knowledge of a domain can also be encoded as a "knowledge map," or "taxonomy," i.e., a hierarchically organized set of categories." Allowing users to navigate to the document without searching, and placing the document into a context to help the user decide its relevance
      Supporting Technologies
      • Manual classification of documents through the use of meta-data as in Content and Asset management systems
      • Classification of documents to a taxonomy created by the organization
      • Automated taxonomy and classification engines utilizing Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, etc.
    • MetaData Generation such as Summarization - "Summarizers use the sentence-selection method, originated by Luhn in 1958, in which an indicative summary is constructed from what are judged to be the most salient sentences in a document"
      Supporting Technologies
      • Document-summarization software
      • MetaData extraction programs
  4. Explicit to Tacit - "Technology to help users form new tacit knowledge, for example, by better appreciating and understanding explicit knowledge."
    Supporting Technologies
    • Tools listed above to facilitate the access to knowledge and the classification of knowledge can help convert the stored explicit knowledge to a tacit understanding for the user
    • Online or computer education
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arvato systems and Knowledge Management

arvato systems creates or integrates and manages many examples of the technologies listed above; portals, search engines, categorization tools, content management tools, asset management tools, etc.

We also have a partnership with Empolis whose "empolis knowledge management suite (e:kms) is an XML-enabled modular enterprise platform for knowledge management providing a seamless integration of document management, content lifecycle management and information access management… It combines the three possible information access paradigms searching, notification, navigation in one product. Explicit ontologies and intelligent retrieval offer a variety of features unknown to competing systems thorugh its implementation of empolis orange…a top performing retrieval technology based on case-based reasoning, which accompanies users' search as a virtual assistant…

Content enrichment, explanation components, and automatic user dialogs build an efficient and user friendly Knowledge Management system. And most important: as part of the e:kms it has access to all information stored in the system - from content to meta data, from workflow definitions to user management, from publication definitions to link networks. The empolis knowledge manager guarantees knowledge for success."

"e:kms provides portal technology and a secure central user management. It supports intelligent document assembly for web content publishing as well as paper-based publishing. With its open and scalable services based J2EE architecture becomes e:kms the solution for Enterprise Knowledge Management."

Whatever your needs in the area of Knowledge Management, arvato systems can help you find the best solution.

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