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Information Technology for Knowledge Management
Uwe M. Borghoff
Rank Xerox Research Centre, Grenoble Laboratory
6, chemin de Maupertuis. F-38240 Meylan, France
E-mail: borghoff@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com
Remo Pareschi
Rank Xerox Research Centre, Grenoble Laboratory
6, chemin de Maupertuis. F-38240 Meylan, France
E-mail: pareschi@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com
Abstract: Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of
organizations. Can information technology help the growth and the sustainment of
organizational knowledge? The answer is yes, if care is taken to remember that IT here is just
a part of the story (corporate culture and work practices being equally relevant) and that the
information technologies best suited for this purpose should be expressly designed with
knowledge management in view. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer
Science contains a selection of papers from the First Conference on Practical Applications of
Knowledge Management. Each paper describes a specific type of information technology
suitable for the support of different aspects of knowledge management.
Key Words: knowledge management, information technology, knowledge life-cycle,
knowledge work processes, corporate memories, information filtering
Category: A.1, H.4.m, I.2.1, K.m
1 Knowledge Management
Managers, consultants, IT professionals and customers believe that they have finally
discovered what makes organizations work: knowledge—that invisible force that
propels the most successful companies to stock market values which far exceed the
visible assets of their financial balance sheet. Where does this knowledge come
from? The financial balance sheet, based on such tangible assets as capital and
equity, does not tell us. Yet this is what stock market investors look for when they
decide to raise the market value of a company—they invest in the specific know-
how of the company to produce future cash flows. At its simplest, the knowledge
movement in organizational thinking is about refining rules of thumb used by
investors into techniques and methodologies for the knowledge auditing of
organizations. This new view of organizations should help investors to make their
choices in a more informed way by basing them on a sound, systematic ground.
Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 3, no. 8 (1997), 835-842
submitted: 1/6/97, accepted: 10/8/97, appeared: 28/8/97 Springer Pub. Co.
More than that, it should aid managers to identify the real weaknesses and strengths
of the organizations they run, and to set up the priorities in order to make them
grow.
Thus, the knowledge movement has proposed to put knowledge on the balance sheet
in the form of intangible assets that account for organizations’ intellectual capital.
Such intangibles include: employees’ competence; the internal structure of
organizations, given by their patents, their own models, concepts and processes,
their administrative system and IT infrastructure; their external structure, given by
the relationships they have developed with customers and suppliers, their brand
names, trademarks, image and reputation (Sveiby 1997). Some companies, most
famous Skandia, a Swedish financial services firm, have started to develop
knowledge auditing methodologies and to publish an intellectual balance sheet.
But there is more than this. With respect to earlier, more scientific approaches to
knowledge, from western epistemology to artificial intelligence, the knowledge
movement has brought the new awareness that organizational knowledge is
something inherently fluid and elusive, so inextricably linked with humans that
people very often take it away once they leave the place; something that defeats
being captured by rules and formulas and that comes in many different shapes and
forms, one form dynamically transmuting into another. In particular, we have
learned to distinguish between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge (Nonaka and
Takeuchi 1995).
Explicit knowledge is formal knowledge that can be packaged as information and
can be found in the documents of an organization: reports, articles, manuals, patents,
pictures, images, video, sound, software etc. Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge
embedded in individual experience and is shared and exchanged through direct, eye-
to-eye contact. Clearly, tacit knowledge can be communicated in a most direct and
effective way. By contrast, acquisition of explicit knowledge is indirect: it must be
de-coded and re-coded into one’s mental models, where it is then internalized as
tacit knowledge.
In reality, these two types of knowledge are like two sides of the same coin, and are
equally relevant for the overall knowledge of an organization. Tacit knowledge is
practical knowledge that is key to getting things done, but has been sadly neglected
in the past, falling very often victim to the latest management fad. For instance, the
recent spate of business process re-engineering initiatives, where cost reduction was
generally identified with the laying off of people—the real and only repositories of
tacit knowledge—has damaged the tacit knowledge of many organizations. Explicit
knowledge defines the identity, the competencies and the intellectual assets of an
organization independently of its employees; thus, it is organizational knowledge
par excellence, but it can grow and sustain itself only through a rich background of
tacit knowledge.
Indeed, the other great discovery of the knowledge movement lies in the following
simple observation: knowledge that doesn’t flow doesn’t grow and eventually ages
836 Borghoff U.M., Pareschi R.: Information Technology for Knowledge Management
and becomes obsolete and useless—just as money which is saved without being
invested eventually loses value until it becomes worthless. By contrast, knowledge
that flows, by being shared, acquired and exchanged, generates new knowledge.
Existing tacit knowledge can be expanded through its socialization in communities
of interest and of practice, and new tacit knowledge can be generated through the
internalization of explicit knowledge by learning and training. New explicit
knowledge can be generated through the externalization of tacit knowledge, as
happens, for instance, when new best practices are selected among the informal
work practices of an organization. Existing explicit knowledge can be combined to
support problem-solving and decision-making, for instance through the application
of data mining techniques to identify meaningful data relationships inside corporate
databases. These four different phases of the knowledge life-cycle—socialization,
internalization, externalization and combination—have been formalized by Nonaka
and Takeuchi (1995) in the diagram in Fig. 1. Under this view, “knowledge
management” can be explained as the management of the environment that makes
knowledge flow through all the different phases of its life-cycle.
Socialization
Tacit Explicit
Tacit
Explicit Internalization
Externalization
Combination
F
rom
To
F
igure 1. Knowledge Conversion as proposed by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995)
2 Information Technology for Knowledge Management
There is an ongoing lively debate about the role that information technology can
play for knowledge management. On the one hand, information technology is used
pervasively in organizations, and thus qualifies as a natural medium for the flow of
knowledge. A recent study from the American Productivity and Quality Center
shows that organizations embarking in knowledge management efforts generally
rely, for accomplishing their goals, on the setting up of a suitable IT infrastructure
(AP&QC 1997). At the other end of the spectrum, leading knowledge management
theorists have warned about the attitude that drives management towards strong
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investments in IT, possibly at the expense of investments in human capital; see for
instance Sveiby (1997a).
The danger that this viewpoint sees is that IT-driven knowledge management
strategies may end up objectifying and calcifying knowledge into static, inert
information, thus disregarding altogether the role of tacit knowledge. Knowledge
management strategies of this type would bring back the ghost of the infamous, and
none too far in time, re-engineering days, when the corporate motto was “More IT,
less people!”; they conjure grim scenarios of organizations with enough memory to
remember everything and not enough intelligence to do anything with it.
Part of the problem here derives from a linguistic ambiguity: nowadays information
technologies are as much about creating direct connections among people through
such applications as electronic mail, chat-rooms, video-conferencing and other types
of groupware as they are about storing information in databases and other types of
repositories. As for information databases, they can also be fruitfully re-thought, in a
knowledge management perspective, as resources for the sharing of best practices
and for preserving the intellectual capital of organizations. Generally speaking,
investments in IT seem to be unavoidable in order to scale up knowledge
management projects. The best way of applying information technology to
knowledge management is probably a combination of two factors: on the one hand,
the awareness of the limits of information technology, and of the fact that any IT
deployment will not achieve much, if it is not accompanied by a global cultural
change toward knowledge values; on the other hand, the availability of information
technologies that have been expressly designed with knowledge management in
view. This last topic, the design and application of knowledge-oriented information
technology, provided the focus for the conference on Practical Applications of
Knowledge Management held in October 1996 in Basel, Switzerland (Wolf and
Reimer 1996). For this special issue of J.UCS on Information Technology for
Knowledge Management we selected several contributions to the PAKM conference
and asked the authors for extended versions of their papers. The selected
contributions relate to technologies supporting various types of organizational
knowledge during different phases of its life-cycle.
2.1 Process Management
The two papers Two complementary tools for the cooperation in a ministerial
environment by Prinz and Syri and Ariadne: supporting coordination through a
flexible use of knowledge in work processes by Simone and Divitini deal with
workgroup and workflow support of knowledge work. They specifically address
process knowledge, which is explicit, formalized knowledge about executing
sequences of work activities.
Prinz and Syri show how existing process knowledge can be enriched by letting
workers externalize their understanding of new types of tasks through dynamic
extensions of the workflow. Furthermore, they show the benefit of coupling
formalized ways of doing things with non-formal work practices obtained through
838 Borghoff U.M., Pareschi R.: Information Technology for Knowledge Management
direct interactions among people. These non-formal practices create the conditions
for sharing tacit knowledge about processes. They describe a workgroup system
where both approaches co-exist and communicate, and show its use in the context of
a ministerial environment. They point out how the system was easily accepted by
the ministerial workers because it fits, and extends, the way they already do work.
Simone and Divitini start from the complementary aspect of internalizing process
knowledge. They argue that workflow management systems can be “knowledge-
enabled” by moving them to a higher level in the value chain: from systems for
executing processes to systems for learning about processes while they are executed.
This means essentially that the workflow management system must come with
different levels of sophistication in the definition of a given process, just as a search
engine may provide basic search features for casual users and more sophisticated
features for advanced users. As workers get more acquainted and confidential with
the process, they will choose and experiment with more sophisticated ways of doing
things. This in turn may lead to the creation of new process knowledge, as workers
may decide to design themselves new definitions for certain parts of the process, or
to add new sub-processes. Simone and Divitini describe an experimental workflow
management system that supports this free interplay between learning and creation
of process knowledge, and present a case study of its application in a typical
organization of knowledge workers, namely a funding agency for R&D projects.
2.2 Corporate Memories
The role of corporate (or organizational) memories in knowledge management is
addressed in three papers: Negotiating the construction and reconstruction of
organisational memories by Buckingham Shum; Corporate memories for knowledge
management in industrial practice: prospects and challenges by Kühn and Abecker;
and From natural language documents to sharable product knowledge: a knowledge
engineering approach by Rösner et al. Corporate memories record the accumulated
knowledge about the services and the products of an organization, with the purpose
of supporting the continuous enhancement of knowledge-intensive work practices
and of alleviating the risk of “corporate amnesia” due to experts taking away their
knowledge when they leave.
It is possible to build a corporate memory in a totally unstructured way: by
maintaining all documents and recording all practices of an organization. This
approach seems inexpensive; it involves, however, amassing a lot of irrelevant
information that will need to be filtered later on. The opposite approach involves an
intensive initial knowledge engineering effort leading to the construction of
corporate knowledge bases and expert systems. Buckingham Shum proposes a
middle way, which can be particularly viable for organizations of knowledge
workers: the recording of relevant team activities through the use of hypertextual
representations linking the different steps of the activities, highlighting the different
options considered at each step and associating actions and decisions with role and
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competencies of the people involved. Such hypertextual representations are created
and negotiated ex vivo by knowledge workers, rather than reconstructed post mortem
by knowledge engineers; they record process knowledge related to knowledge-
intensive problem-solving and decision-making activities. The negotiation aspect is
very relevant, because explicit knowledge comes often dressed with a deceitful
appearance of “objectivity” which in reality hides a specific point of view.
Acknowledging the existence of this point of view and allowing for its negotiation is
an important step towards getting organizations knowing themselves and making
workers fully empowered. In this way, the negotiated point of view will effectively
reflect the committments of all involved stakeholders, and not just of single groups
and individuals holding “power” roles and positions in the organization.
Rösner et al. describe instead a full-fledged knowledge engineering approach
suitable for building corporate memories from the product knowledge of large
manufacturing organizations such as automotive industries. Starting from the
collections of documents about the products of these organizations (product
specifications, instruction manuals, trouble shooting guides etc.), they show how to
extract the explicit knowledge that is in there and integrate it with further explicit
knowledge obtained by externalizing the tacit knowledge related to the context of
use of the documents. The knowledge thus acquired is represented in the form of
conceptual graphs that relate the different parts of the products, associate parts with
properties and connect single actions for operating the products into complex plans
corresponding to full operating instructions. They show then how the initial
investment needed for building this type of knowledge bases pays off in a number of
ways: by providing capabilities for automatic multilingual document generation, by
providing a knowledge space of existing product knowledge to support the fast
design of new products, by providing a language-independent semantic
representation of product knowledge that could be used to enforce enterprise
coherence for companies operating in multilingual and multicultural environments.
Kühn and Abecker’s paper complements Rösner et al.’s work by defining the
software engineering requirements for supporting this type of corporate memories:
on the basis of three case studies in different manufacturing organizations, they
point out the need of strong integration of corporate memories with existing IT
infrastructures, with particular regard to existing capabilities for database
management, document management and business process support. They describe a
corporate memory architecture that meets these requirements, and point out the
paradigm shift of corporate memories from artificial intelligence to a more general
framework for IT integration.
2.3 Information Filtering
The papers Profiling with the INFOrmer text filtering agent, by Sorensen et al., and
A framework for filtering news and managing distributed data, by Amati et al.,
come from the information retrieval community and describe different systems for
840 Borghoff U.M., Pareschi R.: Information Technology for Knowledge Management
information filtering. Information filtering has become a crucial type of IT support
for knowledge workers, who are faced with ever increasing amounts of information,
both from sources internal to the organization and from external sources such as the
Internet and the World Wide Web.
Sorensen et al. present an intelligent filtering system where individuals may have
profiles, representing long-term “interests,” that are used to measure the relevance
of information. These profiles can then be used to compile natural language queries
into weighted graphs that capture the semantic content of the query with respect to
the given profile. If the query is very specific, and contains a lot of related words,
then the computational overhead of building a graph for the query and for the
requested information pays back by returning answers that match accurately the
interests of the user. Furthermore, profiles can be dynamically updated through user
relevance assessments. Thus, this system provides information filtering capabilities
that can be flexibly adapted to the context and the needs of specific categories of
knowledge workers.
The paper by Amati et al. complements the one by Sorensen et al. by showing how
user profiling can be advantageously combined with less expensive and more
conventional information retrieval techniques. Their approach provides adaptive
information filtering capabilities that can answer simpler queries with more
accuracy than standard non-adaptive information filtering systems. They also show
how to automate part of the “workflow” related to the search of information through
an intelligent agent system that leverages memory-based reasoning techniques to
select relevant information sources and make suggestions for such actions as storing
returned documents into appropriate folders, deleting, printing etc. These agents
learn and tune their own behaviors by direct observation of users’ behaviors.
Acknowledgement
First of all, we would like to thank the authors contributing to this special issue. You
did a great job! A special thank goes to the anonymous referees who provided their
valuable reviews under heavy time constraints, and to Monica Pareschi and Natalie
Glance for helpful comments and suggestions on the writing of this introduction.
References
[AP&QC, 1997] Using Information Technology to Support Knowledge
Management. Consortium Benchmarking Study: Final Report. 1997
[Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995] I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi. The Knowledge-Creating
Company. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1995
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Borghoff U.M., Pareschi R.: Information Technology for Knowledge Management
[Sveiby, 1997] K. E. Sveiby. The New Organizational Wealth: Managing and
Measuring Knowledge-Based Assets. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publ.
1997
[Sveiby, 1997a] K. E. Sveiby. Two Approaches to Knowledge Management: Object
versus Process. Presentation at the seminar on Knowledge Management and
Learning in the European Union, May 1997, Utrecht. Summary published on the
Newsletter on Knowledge Management, June 1997, Kenniscentrum CIBIT, Utrecht.
[Wolf and Reimer, 1996] M. Wolf and U. Reimer (eds.). Proc. 1st Int’l. Conf. on
Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM ’96), Basel, Switzerland, Oct.
1996.
842 Borghoff U.M., Pareschi R.: Information Technology for Knowledge Management
