John DeRiggi
Assignment 15
April 1, 2002
1. Interesting about the article
Specifically I thought that the section describing the use of CoPs was interesting. Before I got to that section of the paper, I began wondering if such a thing existed or group of people existed within successful companies today. The CoPs method seems to be a good tool for knowledge management
2. Not so interesting about the article
I did not find any particlular section very un-interesting
3. Strengths and weaknesses of knowledge management.
The strengths of knowledge management are its ability to allow people to collaborate on a shared goal and use information that co-workers or team members may have. Companies distributed across the world can use knowledge managament to work together.
Knowledge management has been hurt by excess hype and expectations. It shares many of the same characteristics as artificial intelligence which also has high expectations and initially, poorer performance than hoped
4. Push and pull technologies
A push technology is technology that determines what information it thinks that you need and then delivers it for you. This kind of technology does the searching for you. Pull technologies provide the user with the ability to find the information that he/she needs. The user does the searching in a pull technology system.
5. Quotations
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana)
Knowledge management is a method for taming this problem. Companies or groups of people can avoid repeating the past by storing useful information or information that they think will be useful again in the future. Groups that do this must also have some system for retrieving this information. This brings us to the next quote:
"Innovation is everywhere; the difficulty is learning from it" (John Seeley Brown)
Storing useful information is part of the solution to avoiding repeating the past. The other part of the solution involves having a good way of retrieving the information once it is stored away.