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Summary of Assignment 16 by Randell Rivadeneira 1. what did you find 1.1. interesting about the article? Many people found it very interesing the idea of Knowledge Management. They were interested by the examples the paper provided an some main concepts, such as: "knowledge champion", "In touch" and "The Right Information, to the Right People, at the Right Time". There was someone who did not found the paper interesting at all, since it was not an area of interest. 1.2. not interesting about the article? Some people found that he InTouch system was not interesting. Also someone was not interested in the examples since they were about an oil company (although Schlumberger is not realy an oil company, more of an oil services company). And at last one person found that the paper was a bit dry. 2. what do you consider the main message of the article? Most people though that the main article was the importance of Knowledge Management and Knowledge Systems. That an organization should invest time and resources in order to use/implement a Knolwedge Management system. It also should encourage people to use and also support their use by technological means that pay attention to community of practices. But technology also should not be considered as the silver bullet in providing a Knowledge Management Enterprise. 3. what are 3.1. the strengths / successes and Most of the people agreed that " thestrengths/successes of knowledge management are that information is stored in a single area where anyone can go to find an answer." Also they found that some other stregths where: add better and new practices, address ongoing maintainance task and involve the community in knowledge sharing. 3.2. the weaknesses /failures of knowledge management? Some of the waknesses noted by people are: not enough good information to seed the system, way to involve the community in using the system, searches might not find relevant information, too high expectations, data too complex to do meaningfull analysis. 4. what are you personal experiences with 4.1. knowledge management and 4.2. knowledge management systems? Both this question were answered in the use of some type of knowledge management system. Most of the people speak of experience with websites that provide some repository of information where one can search. Then there were experiencies of specific products used in the company (such as database used by sales representatives, or repository of software). They all agreed that updating and community involvement is not enough but better than nothing. Then there was a person who considered cell phone, PDA, message boards and other as all being knowledge management systems as long they serve to communicate, translate or provide knowledge to the user. 5. How would you differentiate between "pull" and "push" approaches in knowledge management? What are the trade-offs between the two approaches? In which situations would you use one or the other approach? The majority agreed that pull approach mean that a person is looking for the information in the system by its own desire. That it is not forced and searches by its own will. While push, the user is forced to use the system or forced to look at specific results. The advantages of using push was to familiarize a user with a complex system (if used push in complex system, it might be difficult for the user to understand). But a push approach will also make the user to look at areas of knowledge that he/she might not be interested. While a pull aproach might not be good in a complex system. It is very useful when the user knows what he is looking for and has some understanding of how to use the system. 6. please discuss why and how the two following quotes are (or are not) relevant for knowledge management: 6.1. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana) They all said that by having knowledge of the past one can avoid to repeat the same mistakes and avoid to reinvent knowledge. Hence, it is of importance to store historical knowledge and be in a format that can be analyzed. 6.2. "Innovation is everywhere; the difficulty is learning from it" (John Seeley Brown) There is a lot of information that can overwhelmed someone. They all agree that a Knowledge Management System should provide help in dealing with such amount of information, by providing it and analysing it. |
