For many years now, KM practitioners have been practicing “KM on the fly.” Many valuable empirical lessons and best practices have been garnered through experience with many diverse organizations. However, KM needs to be grounded in more robust, sound theoretical foundations—something more than “it worked well last time so . . . .” The KM models’ key role is to ensure a certain level of completeness or depth in the practice of KM: a means of ensuring that all critical factors have been addressed. The second practical benefit of a model-driven KM approach is that models not only enable a better description of what is happening but also help provide a better prescription for meeting organizational goals. KM models help to explain what is happen- ing now, and they provide us with a valid blueprint or road map for getting organizations where they want to be with their knowledge management efforts.
KEY POINTS
■ Knowledge management encompasses data, information, and knowledge (sometimes referred to collectively as content) and addresses both tacit and explicit forms of knowledge.
■ The von Krogh and Roos KM model takes an organizational epistemology approach and emphasizes that knowledge resides both in the minds of indi- viduals and in the relations they form with other individuals.
■ The Nonaka and Takeuchi KM model focuses on knowledge spirals that explain the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and then back again as the basis for individual, group, and organizational inno- vation and learning.
■ Choo and Weick adopt a sense-making approach to model knowledge man- agement that focuses on how information elements are fed into organiza- tional actions through sense making, knowledge creating, and decision making.
■ The Wiig KM model is based on the principle that in order for knowledge to be useful and valuable, it must be organized through a form of semantic network that is connected, congruent, and complete, and that has perspec- tive and purpose.
■ Complex adaptive systems are particularly well suited to model KM as they view the organization much like a living entity concerned with independent existence and survival. Beer, as well as Bennet and Bennet, have applied this approach to describe the cohesiveness, complexity, and selective pressures that operate on intelligent complex adaptive systems (ICAS).
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. Compare and contrast the cognitivist and connectionist approaches to knowledge management. Why is the connectionist approach more suited to the von Krogh KM model? What are the strengths of this approach?
What are its weaknesses? Use examples to make your points.
2. Describe how the major types of knowledge (e.g., tacit and explicit) are transformed in the Nonaka and Takeuchi knowledge spiral model of KM. Use a concrete example to make your point (e.g., a “bright” idea that occurs to an individual in the organization).
a. Which transformation would prove to be the most difficult? Why?
b. Which transformation would prove to be fairly easy? Why?
c. What other key factors would influence how well the knowledge spiral model worked within a given organization?
3. In what ways is the Choo and Weick KM model similar to the Nonaka and Takeuchi KM model? In what ways do the two models differ?
a. How does the integration of a bounded rationality approach to deci- sion making strengthen this model? Give some examples.
b. List some of the key triggers that are required in order for the sense- making KM model approach to be successful.
4. How is the Wiig KM model related to the Nonaka and Takeuchi model?
In what important ways do they differ?
a. List some examples of internalization to illustrate how each of the five levels differs.
b. How do public, private, and shared knowledge differ? What are the implications of managing these different types of knowledge accord- ing to the Wiig KM model?
5. Outline the general strategy you would use in order to implement the Boisot I-Space KM model. Where would you expect to encounter diffi- culties? What would be some of the expected benefits to the organiza- tion of applying this approach?
6. What is the major advantage of a complex adaptive system approach to a KM model? What are some of the drawbacks?
a. Provide an everyday example of requisite variety. Next, apply this to the management of knowledge in an organization. What are the key elements needed in order to successfully regulate a complex adaptive system? Why?
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