Week 4

KMCS APPROACHES

Evaluate existing Information: Identifying and evaluating the current knowledge makes it easier to point out the critical missing gaps & justify the formation of new knowledge. As a part of this phase, we focus on the system justification, scoping the evaluation, determining feasibility.

a. System Justification: Developer to justify whether it is worth undergoing changes that ensures top support.KM system justification involves answers to specific questions.

1. Is current knowledge going to be lost through retirement, transfer or departure to other firms?

2. Is the proposed KM system needed in sever locations?

3. Are experts available & willing to help in building a KM system?

4. Does the problem in question require ears of experience & cognitive reasoning to solve?

5. When undergoing knowledge capture, can expert articulate how the problem will be solved?

6. How critical is the knowledge to be captures?

7. Is there a champion in the house?

b. Scope Factor: Consider breadth and depth of the project within financial, human resource, & operational constraints. Project must be completed quickly enough for users to foresee its benefits. Check to see how the current technology will match technical requirements of the proposed KM system

c. Feasibility Question: A feasibility study addresses several questions:

Is the project doable? Affordable? Appropriate? Practicable?

Traditional approach to conducting a feasibility study could be useful in building KM system. It involves several tasks:

Form a KM team.

Prepare a master plan

Evaluate cost/performance of the proposed KM system.

Quantify system criteria & costs (rating scale).

d. Role of Strategic Planning: Risky to plunge into a KMS without strategy, Knowledge developer should consider.

Vision — Foresee what the business is trying to achieve, how it will be done, and how the new system will achieve goals

Resources — check on the affordability of the business to invest in a new KM system

Culture — is the company’s political and social environment amenable to adopting a new KM system?

Form the KM Team: After the evaluation of the company’s existing infrastructure is complete; a KM team should be formed. Team success depends on a number of factors:

1. Caliber of team members in terms of personality, communication skills &experience.

2. Team size.

3. Complexity of the project.

4. Leadership & team motivation.5.Promising more than can be realistically delivered.

Knowledge Capture: Knowledge capture involves eliciting, analyzing & interpreting the knowledge that a human expert uses to solve a particular problem. Knowledge capture & transfer are often carried out in teams, not just through individuals. Capture includes determining feasibility, choosing the expert, tapping the expert’s knowledge, and tapping the knowledge to plug gaps in the system & to verify and validate the knowledge base after the system is in operation. A competent & cooperative expert is essential to the success of knowledge capture.

Design of the KM Blueprint: The KM system design (blueprint) addresses several issues:

System interoperability and scalability with existing company IT infrastructure, Finalize scope of proposed KM system with realized net benefits, Decide on required system components, Develop the key layers of the KM architecture to meet company requirements. Key layers are: User interface

Authentication/security layer, Collaborative agents and filtering, Application layer, Transport Internet

Physical layer.

Testing the KM System:

Verification procedure: ensures that the system is right

Validation procedure: ensures that the system is the right system. Validation of KM systems is not foolproof

Implement the KM System: Implementation means converting a new KM system into actual operation.

Conversion is the major step in implementation.

The other steps are post implementation review & KM system maintenance.

It is the transformation of the precise representation of knowledge into machine equivalent -a specific program or software package.

Manage Change and Rewards Structure: Goal is to minimize resistance to change.Experts, Regular employees (users), Troublemakers.Resistances via projection, avoidance, or aggression

Post-system Evaluation: Assess the system’s impact in terms of effects on.People, Procedures,

Performance of the business. Areas of concern: Quality of decision making, Attitude of end users,

Costs of Knowledge processing and up-date.

Kulsum Raza !

Week3

Knowledge Management Systems Life Cycle

CHALLENGES IN BUILDING KM SYSTEMS: 

A knowledge management project has uncovered a number of difficulties in implementing knowledge management systems.

Among these difficulties are the following:

• Changing Organization Culture: Management support / sponsorship demonstrating business value change management implications keeping up with new technologies security.
• Knowledge Evaluation: Manage integrated databases, interoperability, navigational tools of the organization.
• Knowledge Processing: Content in repositories lacks context, making documents difficult to understand.
• Knowledge Implementation: Individual employees are not rewarded for contributing content, and many fear sharing knowledge with others.

Key Differences and Similarities: The systems analyst gathers data and information from the users and the users depend on analysts for the solution. The knowledge developer gathers knowledge from people with known knowledge and the developer depends on them for the solution. Conventional systems development is primarily sequential, whereas KMSLC is incremental and interactive. In case of conventional systems, testing is usually done towards the end of the cycle (after the system has been built), whereas in KMSLC, the evolving system is verified and validated from the beginning of the cycle. Systems development and systems management is much more extensive for conventional information systems than it is for KMSLC. The conventional systems life cycle is usually process-driven and documentation-oriented whereas KMSLC is result-oriented. The conventional systems development does not support tools such as rapid prototyping since it follows a predefined sequence of steps KMSLC can use rapid prototyping incorporating changes on the spot.

Stages of KMS: 

There are eight stages of KMS:

System justification: 

It begins finding the experts that are interested in building the KM system and does these experts require years of experience and knowledge. The system should be complete quickly and using the latest technologies. Strategies should be made before building a Km system. The development team should keep the vision, resource, culture in mind while working on it.

Forming team: 

The team should be formed according to the complexity of project and ability and motivation of team members and their core competencies.

Knowledge Capturing: 

Knowledge capturing is an important stage of the km system. Accessing the value of information from repositories. Rending knowledge from organizational experts.

Design the km blue print: 

In designing the km blue print address several issues in deciding the system component, developing the software architecture.

Testing the KM system: 

Verification determines if the system was built right, while validation ensures that the correct system was built to meet the user’s expectations.

Implement the KM system: 

Before implementing the Km system quality assurance is very important factor .conversation the system in real life operation includes data and file conversion.

Kulsum Raza!

Week 2

"Luck is not in your hand but Work is. Your work can make your luck, but luck can not do your work."

Understanding Knowledge

Knowledge can be made up of facts, procedural rules and heuristics. Fact is a statement representing the truth, Procedural rule is the sequence of actions and Heuristic rule is actually based on experience that one gets based on years. Intelligence is the ability which is used to apply knowledge. Common Sense is opinions of humans. Cognitive Psychology is the study of human intelligence which needs to recognize cognitive structure and process.

• Data: Raw facts.
• Information:  Processed Data.
• Knowledge: Understanding of Information.
• Event: Based on decisions to perform action.

Subjective & Objective Views: 

In subjective view, Reality is erected through interaction with the other individuals. As its a ongoing process so it continues to affect and influence by social practices. Knowledge can be considered as state of individual mind and Practice. In objective view, Reality is based on human perception.So here, knowledge is kept in the form of object which can be discovered. Knowledge can be considered as Objects, capability and access to information.

Types of Knowledge:

• Procedural Knowledge: Based on knowledge that someone has, which can be explained by the procedure of doing something (Sequence of steps).
• Declarative Knowledge: Based on knowledge that someone knows about something but don't have practical understanding.
• Tacit Knowledge: Based on individual experience which is difficult to share and express.
• Explicit: Based on knowledge that can be represented in words or numbers.
• Individual Knowledge
• Collective Knowledge

Maheen Asif !

Week 1

"Practice without 'Knowledge' is fruitless & Knowledge without 'Practice' is useless."

Knowledge based management system is a computer program that provide information using given data which can used to solve complex problem using various techniques. Data is basically raw facts which can be processed to get an information about anything (Information => Processed Data). Knowledge is actually understanding and experience of any Information.. Through knowledge, we can get wisdom which is used for decision making to find solution of the complex problem.

• Knowledge Management emphases on available knowledge to organize and transfer it across organizations to achieve the goal. It is very important for decision maker to make better and faster decisions.
• Knowledge Management Systems are interaction between latest technologies and social mechanism. It is used to promote Knowledge management (Means to enable drastic improvement in Knowledge management).
• Effective Knowledge Management is to make reusable solutions to use them across the several projects later. It is necessary to reduce dependencies on individuals.

Knowledge management system plays important and active role on building the contents of the systems but many organizations having KM systems have failed to enable sharing the knowledge. The knowledge management system implementations are as follows:

• Knowledge Discovery System
• Knowledge Sharing System
• Knowledge Capture System
• Knowledge Application System

Maheen Asif !