We go on to look at the contributions of OR and the OR community to knowledge management, including a bibliometric analysis of KM papers in OR journals. From knowledge engineering to knowledge management, knowledge management essay. Only when one of the software knowledge management essay effectively apprenticed herself to a master baker to learn how it was done was the task successfully accomplished. On the contrary, explicit knowledge is the knowledge that is resided in documents, databases, memos and other forms of storage. A closely related category is social capital and networking that fared much better within KM than in OR.
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edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. To browse Academia. edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer, knowledge management essay. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up, knowledge management essay. Download Free PDF. Knowledge management: a review of the field and of OR's contribution Journal of the Operational Research Society, John Edwards, knowledge management essay. Download Download PDF Full PDF Package Download Full PDF Package This Paper. A short summary of this paper.
Download Download PDF. Download Full PDF Package. Translate Knowledge management essay. hall aston. uk, Dr Matthew Hall, knowledge management essay, Operations and Information Management, Aston Business School, Aston University, knowledge management essay, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, U. With the presence of the OR Society journal Knowledge Management Research and Practice and with the INFORMS journal Organization Science, knowledge management essay, OR may be assumed to have an explicit and a leading role in KM.
Unfortunately, the origins and the evidence of recent research efforts do not fully support this assumption. We argue that whilst OR has been inside many of the milestones there is no explicit recognition of its role and while OR research on KM has considerably increased in the last 5 years it still forms a rather modest explicit contribution to KM research. We suggest that a limiting aspect of whether OR will be seen to have a significant profile will be the extent to which developments are recognized as being informed by OR. Key words: knowledge management, operational research; organisational learning, knowledge management essay, intellectual capital. Introduction Knowledge management KM is a term that was coined less than thirty years ago, knowledge management essay, even though it refers to a set of activities that must have been occupying the minds of humans for millennia.
How to make use of what we know? How to find out what others know? How to come up with new ideas? These are just a few of the facets of what has become known as knowledge management. As will become clear, this apparent contradiction of having a new term for a very long-standing phenomenon is typical of the somewhat tangled, knowledge management essay picture that knowledge management presents. Therefore, in reviewing the past, present knowledge management essay future of knowledge management, and its relationship to operational research, it will sometimes be difficult to work in terms of precise milestones and landmarks. Rather, we will often be able to give no more than indications of changes of direction or new developments.
The fuzziness raises its head as soon as we attempt to define knowledge management. There is no common agreed definition. The relationship between these activities, which may be seen as a knowledge knowledge management essay life-cycle, is shown in Figure 1. We will not attempt to define knowledge here, but instead, again knowledge management essay the purposes of this review, adopt the pragmatic viewpoint that if someone claims to be writing about knowledge then we accept their claim. The structure of the paper is as follows. We begin by reviewing the history of KM, which also involves diversions into its pre-history: those disciplines that led to knowledge management, but were not called KM at the time. We go on to look at the contributions of OR and the OR community to knowledge management, including a bibliometric analysis of KM papers in OR journals.
We then offer some observations about future directions for KM, especially those that we believe may be most fruitful for OR. The history of knowledge management It is typical of any academic discourse in the business and management field that research and scholarship follow in the wake of new business and management practices: Theory follows practice more than practice follows theory. In the case of knowledge management, the first evidence that businesses were paying attention to the need to manage knowledge came in the s, but it is not until the s that the first academic papers and conferences knowledge management essay starting to comment and theorise upon this interesting new phenomenon.
The explosion of interest in KM caused some to question whether this was simply a passing fad e. Quintas et al, or seek to explain its emergence in terms of the waxing and waning of management fashion e. Scarborough and Swan, This section therefore raises two key questions in turn: First, why has knowledge and the need to manage knowledge become an object of management attention? Second, what is the genealogy of knowledge management as an academic discourse? These two questions cannot always be so conveniently separated, as it is often academic publications knowledge management essay the observations of new business and management practices are made.
According to Wiig b the earliest documented success of a corporation adopting a knowledge-focus to its management practice was Chaparral Steel, which was later written about by Leonard-Barton By the late s most of the large management consulting firms had begun to integrate knowledge management into their business strategy, and to offer KM in their portfolio of consultancy offerings. In the Swedish insurance company Skandia appointed Leif Edvinsson as the first Director of Intellectual Capital, a position now institutionalised in many corporations as the Chief Knowledge Officer CKO. Many writers point out that knowledge and knowledge processes have always been important to organisations and their managers, knowledge management essay. A number of related factors have together conflated the arrival of KM as a focus of organisational attention.
For Knowledge management essayp. For modern companies the evolution of technology in one sense has facilitated the potential to configure knowledge in novel ways, and in another sense has precipitated the imperative to manage knowledge more effectively: For Quintas Quintas, the need to innovate more quickly as the economy gathers pace, and the importance of sharing knowledge across organisational boundaries, are imperatives of knowledge management in a global network society. This is not to say that discourses around the themes of knowledge discussed in the previous section did not exist before this point. As we shall see in this section, the KM discourse represents a confluence of several academic disciplines — incorporating organisational behaviour, human resource management, computer science, information management, accountancy, and more — which collectively have converged on this predominantly practitioner-led phenomenon of knowledge as a focus for management attention.
In this section we shall review the key academic strands which pre-configured the KM discourse, knowledge management essay. We shall then go on to see how the KM discourse diverged, leading to a knowledge management essay 2nd generation of KM. Organisational learning Before the conflation of the KM phenomenon, the importance of knowledge in organisations was already receiving considerable attention in the literature on learning in organisations. Senge, Although in the past, research in learning was dominated by a cognitive and mental view of learning processes, knowledge management essay recently sociologists and psychologists knowledge management essay turned their attention to the social and cultural conditions in which learning occurs, of which the organisational context is a significant realm.
Organisations are networks of social relations and systems of meaning through which knowledge in the workplace is learned Wenger, knowledge management essay, The literature on situated learning Lave et al, knowledge management essay. Business process reengineering The movement that became known as business process reengineering BPR came into being in a relatively short space of time at the beginning of the s. As a result, it seemed that drastic action was called for. Two papers appeared in quick succession in top American business journals Davenport et al. Contrary to what was widely perceived at the time, neither claimed to have invented the concept of BPR. Rather, they were trying to produce frameworks to describe and generalise what knowledge management essay companies had already been doing.
However, knowledge management essay, as the BPR movement collapsed, so knowledge knowledge management essay arose, and there were and are clear links between the two. These include the realisation of the importance of knowledge for organisations, an emphasis on process thinking, knowledge management essay, the need to balance people, process and technology views, and not least the continuing presence of Tom Davenport. the development of knowledge-based systems. The connection to knowledge management is evident in the word knowledge, but goes much deeper.
The phrase knowledge-based systems later came to be preferred by many to the more pretentious expert systems, but both phrases are knowledge management essay in common use. Thirty years of experience in developing them has also given rise to a great deal of understanding of the processes of trying to codify knowledge, which in KBS terms would be called processes of knowledge acquisition. Indeed, Karl Wiig was working on expert systems at the time he coined the term knowledge management, and the short final section of his book on expert systems Wiig, is one of the earliest publications of any kind on knowledge management.
Similarly, the bread-making example discussed by Nonaka and Takeuchi would be seen as a typical AI example by those in that area. This involved the attempts by the Japanese company Matsushita to develop a home bread- making machine, knowledge management essay. Only when one of the software engineers effectively apprenticed herself to a master baker to learn how it was knowledge management essay was the task successfully accomplished. AI specialists would see this as an example of the role of the knowledge engineer. However, the implications of the knowledge elicitation work on tacit, implicit and explicit knowledge seem to have been largely overlooked.
Resource-based view of the firm The notion that knowledge can and should be managed emerges most obviously among those who advocate a resource-based view of the firm, which was first developed by Grant Grant subsequently discussed the centrality of knowledge to the resource-based theory Grant, ; Grant, Although Nonaka was not necessarily an advocate of the resource-based view, his influential theory of organisational knowledge creation Nonaka, ; Nonaka et al. From 1st generation to 2nd generation KM According to Roos and Von Kroghknowledge management essay, SveibyQuintas et alAlvesson and Karreman and Scarbrough and Swanthe early KM discourse therefore evolved around knowledge management essay perspectives on knowledge. KM in practice A practitioner perspective on the development of KM is provided by the results of the MAKE awards Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises.
These have been decided as part of a research study carried out annually by Teleos, a research company specialising in KM and intellectual capital, in association with the KNOW network, beginning in Table 1 shows the Top 20 in and in It is strongly biased towards companies with headquarters in the USA 16 out of 20and the only other region represented is Europe. For more detail on the study, see Chase, There has also been an increase in the diversity of the business sectors of the nominated companies. Inalmost all the nominated companies came from just six sectors: chemicals, computers, electronics and electrical equipment, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and professional services, whereas in some 20 sectors are represented.
These trends can be taken as representative of the state of KM in practice more generally in larger organisations. The nature of the study means that SMEs will not appear in the MAKE awards lists, and indeed there is evidence that the KM needs of SMEs are substantially different from those of larger organisations Chen et al. KM and the OR knowledge management essay Where is OR and Management Science MS in all of this? As with some other fields of endeavour, there are many OR influences and connections throughout the development of KM, if one knows where to look for them, but conversely OR is not the first area that leaps into the minds of non-OR people when thinking about the disciplines that have been involved in the rise of KM.
When exploring PSMs and KM, Montibeller et al identify three aspects of PSMs: modelling support, using formal modelling techniques that underpin the PSM; facilitator support, someone to lead those involved through the use of the PSM; a methodology of facilitation, to ensure the group analyses the knowledge management essay rigorously and in an appropriate theoretical manner. The process, and the representations they create, helps those involved to: share knowledge through recording their views and making those available for others to absorb; organize knowledge by structuring the views into comprehensible representations; acquire knowledge from what others have shared; create knowledge by synthesizing competing views; use knowledge by explicitly relating the resulting PSM outcome to the representation.
Thus, this process articulates makes explicit some of the knowledge that is believed to be relevant and records it as a group memory. The apparently strong affinity between PSMs and Knowledge management essay does feed through to KM research, especially by those in the OR KM community Sutton, ; Coakes et al, ; Edwards et al, ; Shaw and Edwards,
500 word essay on responsibility
Marriner Tomey states that a person can allow the experience of the members of staff around them can be left to perform their duties whilst still receiving feedback from the team, which worked well for the OM as the MERIT team has a doctor who has a higher clinical skill set. Bass and Riggio do suggest that a laissez-faire approach can lead to ineffective decision making, whereas Lewin goes further to state that a group without leadership can become non-productive over time. Einarsen states that a lassa-faire leadership can create friction within the groups due to the lack of leadership.
Although this maybe the case, due to the small group of the crew. The MERIT team used a very autocratic leaderships due to the possible seriousness of the wounds, as this method provided clear instructions on what needed to be done without having to worry about why Stanley, A democratic leadership style may have worked well due to it allowing the delegation of the work to varying crew members to do the tasks required Gastil, However due to the nature of injuries to the patient, they would not have benefitted from a democratic leadership style, as Frandsen states this style takes time to collect on the information and is slow. Frandsen states a more relaxed style, such as democratic, would have been good to put the patient at ease and be able gather the opinions of everyone who was there, which can lead to better staff satisfaction as their opinions are seen as of value.
Frandsen does go on to explain that this process takes a long time to process the opinions and can lead to anxiety in experienced staff. This style of leadership would not have been effective as the situation required a rapid decision process. Introduction In the current world setting, with organizations trying to minimize their costs utilized in maintaining and reclaiming information stored as knowledge, that a general increasing trend in the study of Knowledge Management has been observed. Throughout this paper we will first observe the effects of Knowledge management in the case study of Infosys. Knowledge is information, paperss, or different accomplishments that are achieved by an organisation or an single through their preparation, instruction, or practical experiences and be able to explicate or turn to any issue.
Persons can better their cognition via complex cognitive procedure such as communicating, acquisition, skill, and statement. Data is a set of distinct…. Proton headquartered is located in Shah Alam, Selangor, with a manufacturing plant in Tanjung Malim, Perak. Proton is a core member…. One of the most common injuries that affect people is a burn. As its name implies, burns are a type of injury that can be caused by sunlight, heat, fire, electricity, or chemicals, Familydoctor. org, among others. However before one is able to understand in detail the different degrees of burns and the treatment for…. Last December 7, , we conducted our very first seminar as a Fifth Year Student. It was held at Lyceum of the Philippines University — Batangas Campus I was excited for the seminar, because I know that I will learn a lot of things to enhance my knowledge as an Industrial Engineering student.
The objective…. Post KM OR publications are averaging at 38 publications per year with a very healthy increasing trend. We believe that this trend can continue for there are many future directions which OR is uniquely placed to capitalise upon e. risk management; personal KM including methods for individual decision making; reinterpreting KM in several ways including its interaction with decision support, complexity and community OR. We now discuss these areas for future research. Risk management The area of risk management is attracting increased attention across many management disciplines. The risks may be financial, safety, security, project, technological or economic, to name just a few types. Since knowledge has a crucial part to play in the avoidance or mitigation of risk, the potential benefits of a closer alignment between knowledge management and risk management are clear.
Financial risk management, medical risk management and nuclear risk management have all traditionally tended to work very much within their own self-referential world. However, the context of this decision-making has changed in the 21st century, because of the influence of public opinion. For example, the public reaction to various financial scandals, starting with that of Enron, has led to changes in the way that financial management is carried out and reported, and this greater openness also means that there is a greater opportunity for combating disciplinary insularity. It is also necessary to include social perceptions of risk as well. This is where OR, with its ability to combine hard and soft approaches, can continue to make a contribution, e. in project risk Ackermann et al. Indeed, financial risk management ought to be particularly fertile ground, since the contributions of OR in models for credit scoring have already been considerable: see for example Thomas et al Personal KM Most theorising about knowledge management KM has been at the organisation level.
Problem structuring methods of all kinds are needed for PKM, especially those that explicitly aim to represent a particular viewpoint about a human activity system. Analytic methods to help work more effectively, rather than just more efficiently, are also vital, as are techniques to deal with information overload. Multiple views of KM We are entering the third generation of KM — there has been too much of a backlash against the over-technologised first generation of KM, resulting in too much attention being paid to the very soft end of the subject. There is scope for more analysis and decision support in KM, and this is of special relevance to OR. Simulation offers possibilities but it is not the discrete event simulation that OR people will be most familiar with: see for example the work on computational modelling of organisations by Nissen and others Nissen et al.
Complexity theory, which has close associations with soft OR and systems, is moving into the mainstream, in part because of developments in KM Snowden et al. These can benefit from KM, but where is KM here — with a few exceptions such as Hasan and work on large government institutions, everyone is looking at for-profits. The notion of community KM - cKM -where social communities preserve knowledge of their own communities through various means — is becoming more typical with social networking, but there are many initiatives worldwide e. books on local communities and villages which have utility for generations, where KM has much to contribute. Conclusion This paper has explored the origins of KM as an academic and practitioner discipline, arguing that the role of OR has been discrete but spread across numerous aspects of KM.
OR informs the inside workings of KM but is not readily visible. For example: the algorithms which underpin many knowledge based systems and search engines ensure OR Inside; many of the OR community have been visible through organising special issues, journals and books whether or not OR has taken a prominent position; many of the key figures have been shown to have emerged from an OR background. Consequently, despite a breadth and depth of significant involvement, the modest visibility of OR means its place in the history of KM could be forgotten. Nevertheless, the future is bright. With an increasing number of journal articles on OR and KM being published we can clearly see space for the role of OR. We believe that there are three opportunities for OR to use its extensive past to significantly develop KM.
The first is on risk management where OR has a strong tradition of modelling and can productively contribute analytical methods and conceptual frameworks, merging hard and soft approaches. On personal KM, the decision making methods at the heart of OR might usefully be translated to individuals. In each of these cases, OR would itself benefit from further development by being applied in this alternative domain. More generally, OR can learn again the lesson which seems is often overlooked — that having OR Inside may be satisfying, but does not improve the overall profile of OR. References Ackermann F, Eden C and Williams T Modeling for litigation: Mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches.
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