Page 227 - DCAP208_Management Support Systems

Management Support Systems

Notes and experience, the more effectively knowledge can be communicated via electronically mediated
channels. At one extreme, the dissemination of explicit, factual knowledge within a stable
community having a high degree of shared contextual knowledge can be accomplished through
access to a central electronic repository. However, when interpretive context is moderately shared,
or the knowledge exchanged is less explicit, or the community is loosely affiliated, then more
interactive modes such as electronic mail or discussion databases are appropriate.

Notes When context is not well shared and knowledge is primarily tacit, communication
and narrated experience is best supported with the richest and most interactive modes
such as video conferencing or face-to-face conversation.

Self Assessment

State True or False:

10. Information technologies offer a potentially useful environment to build a multimedia
repository for rich, explicit knowledge.
11. Effective use of information technology to communicate knowledge does not requires an
organization to share an interpretive context.

13.4 Role of People

Human experts do not have static memories. They can change their internal classification systems
when their conception of something changes, or when their needs for retrieval changes. People
change their focus or their interests and the things they think about and remember change as
well. For the most part, such changes are not conscious. People do not typically know the
internal categorization scheme that they use. They can do this without even realizing they have
done it. This is what a dynamic memory is all about – getting smarter over time without
realizing it. The acquisition of new knowledge actually makes experts smarter, while it often
just makes knowledge management (KM) systems slower.
People seem to be able to cope with new information with ease. We can readily find a place to
store new information in our memories, although we don’t know where or what that location is.
This is all handled unconsciously. We can also find old information, but again we don’t know
where we found it and we can’t really say what the look-up procedure might have been. Our
memories change dynamically in the way they store information by abstracting significant
generalizations from our experiences and storing the exceptions to those generalizations. As we
have more experiences, we alter our generalizations and categorizations of information to meet
our current needs and account for our new experiences.

Despite constant changes in organization, we continue to be able to call up relevant memories
without consciously considering where we have stored them. People are not aware of their own
internal categorization schemes — they are just capable of using them.
The question for KM is how to make systems more like those of people. Human memories
dynamically adjust to reflect new experiences. A dynamic memory is one that can change its
own organization when new experiences demand it. A dynamic memory is by nature a learning
system. No KM system learns. But they need to learn in order to actually work properly.

The underlying question is how knowledge is structured. People structure knowledge when
they build any KM system by inventing a set of categories to put documents in.

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