chapter 5, 6 and 7

Knowledge “Acts”

1 Question Asking and Answering
Question asking and answering is a foundational process by which what people know tacitly becomes expressed, and hence, externalized as knowledge. [Searle, J., 1969] that amongst others categorizes question asking as a form of a speech act.Quigley and Debons [1999] adopted a similar stance that considers information as texts that primarily answer ‘informative’ questions such as who, when, what, or where while knowledge is considered as texts that answer more ‘explanatory’ or ‘meaning related’ questions such as why or how.

2 Posting Content to Repositories
Contributing content such as lessons-learned, project experiences, and success stories is another approach to knowledge sharing.The capturing of best practice has often been highlighted as a form
of externalized knowledge.
Nick et al. [2001], noting the importance of learning by experience, point out that experience bases can be developed using case-based reasoning as the underlying concept. However, they also note that experience repositories require continuous maintenance and updating in order to handle continuous streams of experience.
Selvin and Buckingham [2002] describe a tool, Compendium, that claims to support rapid knowledge construction.They ground their claim on an empirical case study of its use in a corporate contingency planning situation by demonstrating the creation of knowledge content in a real time ‘on-the-fly’mode of content authoring, complemented by collaborative validation.

3 (re)Using Knowledge
Desouza et al. [2006] assert that the decision to consume knowledge can be framed as a problem of risk evaluation, with perceived complexity and relative advantage being identified as factors relating to intentions to “consume” knowledge.
McMahon et al. [2004], studying teamwork involving engineering design, suggest that both codification and personalization approaches to knowledge reuse are relevant. They recognize the notion of information value, allowing for the matching of information to the knowledge needs of the user. They propose that good representations of both information characteristics and user characteristics are essential.

4 Knowledge - Based Decision Making
In general, decision making involves identifying alternatives, projecting probabilities and outcomes of alternatives, and evaluating outcomes according to known preferences and implications for stakeholders.
information flows are a central process that bridges knowledge creation and decision making activity. Information flows continuously between sense making, knowledge creating, and decision making, so that the outcome of information use in one mode provides the elaborated context and the expanded resources for
information use in the other modes [Choo, C., 2002].



Knowledge Management in Practice
Under the aegis of ‘knowledge management’, there are three types of processes that are generally
considered to be essential: 
  • finding or uncovering knowledge [Ehrlich, K., 2003, Learn, L., 2002, Zack,M., 1999], 
  • sharing knowledge [Ackerman et al., 2003], 
  • and the development of new knowledge [Argyris and Schon, 1978, 1996,Baumard, P., 1999,Harvard Business Review, 1998].
Allmay play a role in assisting with decision making and encouraging innovation.

Finding Information and Knowledge
Finding information and knowledge refers to processes that allow organizations to make sense and make use of data, information, and knowledge objects that may be present but are not codified, analyzed, nor accessible to members.
Knowledge exists in all organizations, but all knowledge may not be explicit.Knowledge objects or artifacts are entities that represent knowledge existing within organizational members [McInerney, C., 2002].
One aspect of finding and dissemination of information is the organization of knowledge objects so that they can be found easily. Assigning index terms, tagging or, in the case of an intranet and the Web, metadata, allows ease of retrieval [Learn, L., 2002]. 

Sharing Information and Knowledge
Sharing refers to the willingness and ability of the knowledgeable to share what they know to help others
expand their own learning and knowing.
Teaching and learning activities, such as online universities in industry, mentoring programs, apprenticeships, and training programs all serve as opportunities for individuals to share knowledge.
Based on his experience at Arthur D. Little, he found that the principal reason for reluctance on the part of key players to put their knowledge into a lessons learned database was a concern that the lesson learned might be misapplied if the congruence, or the lack of, between the context of the area from which the lesson
was derived and the context of the intended application area was not well understood.

Development of Knowledge
Knowledge development takes place when individuals work to create new understandings, innovations, and a synthesis of what is known already together with newly acquired information or knowledge. Meetings, teleconferences, planning sessions, knowledge cafes, and team think tank sessions all serve to help workers develop knowledge together.
Allowing individuals to take risks and occasionally make mistakes (and learn from them) can also develop a culture of innovation that fosters the creation of new knowledge through research and experimentation. 

Knowledge Management Issues 
Knowledge is most commonly categorized as either explicit or tacit.This char acterization is rather too simple, but a more important point, and a criticism, is that it is misleading. A much more nuanced and useful characterization is to describe knowledge as explicit, implicit, and tacit.
  • Explicit: information or knowledge that is set out in tangible form.
  • Implicit: information or knowledge that is not set out in tangible form, but could be.
  • Tacit: information or knowledge that one would have extreme difficulty operationally setting out in tangible form.
a knowledge that could only be gained or transferred by having engineers work alongside bread makers
and learn the motions and the ‘feel’ necessary to knead bread dough [Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995].
Prusak, L. [2001] uses the example of reading TedWilliams’ “The Art of Hitting” in an attempt to improve his little league batting skills, and of how little of TedWilliams’ knowledge could, in fact, be made explicit or transferable.
Implicit knowledge is that which has not been made explicit, but could be, an example might be: “One might think that from organization X’s structure and their organizational chart that for this area Smith would be the decision maker, but in fact it is Menendez.”

Ridings et al. [2002] describe a model of trust that they believed occurred in virtual community networks (CoPs). In this model, there are three inputs that lead to trust and to the outputs of the desire to get information and the desire to give information. 
The three inputs are 
(1) perceived responsiveness
is the notion that individuals will eagerly give more information and desire to get information if others respond to them in the network.
(2) others confiding personal information
 is about relieving the feelings of not knowing the people that are in the network.
(3) disposition to trust
More specifically it has been defined as the, “extent that she or he demonstrates a consistent tendency to be willing to depend on others across a broad spectrum or situations and persons”

the emphasis upon “pain points”[Durham,M., 2004,Hasanali, F., 2004, Short and Azzarello, 2004]. Look for a pain point, an area where the organization has a problem and where a success, even a small one, will be visible.


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Iran vs United States



Rhetoric of war has recently escalated between the United States and Iran. The US naval warship USS Lincoln is said to be moving towards the Persian Gulf. The United States has also accelerated development of a 13.6 ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb, which is capable of destroying the underground nuclear facilities of Iran. Notwithstanding the sanctions and embargoes imposed by the West, Iran has sustained and expanded its nuclear program. While Iran has repeatedly insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, the United States claims that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons that pose a threat to global security.

Tensions between the United States and Iran reached new levels recently when Iranian President Mahmhoud Ahmadinejad launched production of enriched uranium fuel rods in Tehran. He also announced the setting up of four more nuclear reactors, showing the West that it has advanced its nuclear technology.

The United States has once against called upon the international community to severe its ties with Iran. But Ahmadinejad is apparently unfazed. He announced, "Some 6,000 centrifuges are operating [in Natanz facility], and 3,000 new ones have been added, bringing the total to 9,000. He also assured that Iran would share this information with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and comply with IAEA safeguards.To the United States, Ahmadinejad asserted, "The era of bullying nations has passed. The arrogant powers cannot monopolize nuclear technology. They tried to prevent us by issuing sanctions and resolutions but failed.

Iran's nuclear program is not new. It date back to 1960s. But after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it had to be stopped. It was revived after 1990 and has progressed notwithstanding US sanctions. Washington accuses Tehran of clandestinely developing nuclear weapons in the garb of its nuclear program in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But not all countries are ready to tow this American line on Iran.One reason is that US claims about Iraq possessing WMD were found false. Moreover, it is well understood that Washington is just trying to secure Israel by limiting Iran's increasing strength in the region.

In December, Iran shocked the world when it claimed to have landed a US drone that it said was spying in Iranian airspace. An embarrassed Pentagon said that the drone crossed into Iranian airspace from Afghanistan owing to a technical snag. Iran has since said that it possesses six American drones, which it has landed by deploying Iranian communication technology.

In January, an Iranian court issued a death sentence to an American of Iranian descent convicted on charges of spying for the CIA.Also in January, an Iranian nuclear scientist died in a terrorist bomb blast in northern Tehran when an unidentified motorcyclist attached a magnetic explosive device to the scientist's car. Iran indicated that it believed the United States and Israel were responsible for the killing.

Tensions also escalated recently when Israeli officials blamed Iran for bomb attacks in the capitals of Georgia, India and Thailand targeted at Israeli embassy personnel. Evidence suggests that the bombings were part of a single plot, for which Israel has blamed Iran. Iranian officials have denied any involvement and accused Israel of conspiring these bombings.

Israel also wants the United States to attack Iran, destroy its nuclear establishments and in the process weaken its military. Washington is not only increasing international pressure on Iran through sanctions, but also encouraging domestic opposition against Ahmadinejad's government within Iran. Washington expected New Delhi to stand with it on Iran issue, but, taking a clear stand, India has politely rejected the American suggestion and instead called for a diplomatic route to break deadlock. Countries like Russia, China and India are apparently choosing standing with Iran over the option of military action.

As US allies, countries like France, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Portugal proposed to stop oil imports from Iran from July onwards. They estimated that Iran could be made to fall in line using such threats. But their policy seems to have boomeranged as Iran has decided to stop crude exports to these countries with immediate effect. By this step, Iran has tried to prove that it is strong enough economically to deflect such threats.

This standoff between the West and Iran is a matter of serious concern in the times of global economic slowdown and the danger of looming recession. Does Iran treat American threats as mere hollow rhetoric? Economic slowdown has crippled Washington's ability to get involved in another needless war. Perhaps this is the reason why Iran is openly challenging US hegemony.

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Theorizing Knowledge in Organizations


The literature has discussed organizational knowledge both as a resource [Grant, R., 1996] and a process of learning [Argyris and Schon, 1978, Senge, P., 1990], often emphasizing one aspect over the other.


3.1 KNOWLEDGE AS RESOURCE AND PROCESS
Baumard, P. [1999] proposes looking at knowledge in organizations along two dimensions: tacit-explicit versus individual-collective. He defines four quadrants in which knowledge types are situated: tacit individual (intuitiveness), tacit-collective (social practice), explicit-individual (expertise), and, explicit collective (rules). Grounding the use of the quadrants in observations of exemplar case-study organizations, Baumard suggests that the creation of organizational knowledge can be tracked by locating actors’ responses (knowing) within the appropriate quadrants of the matrix


3.2 INTERACTIONS FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION
While knowledge itself may be perceived as a resource, its creation occurs through human interactions, whether physical or virtual. For example, for knowledge to emerge from within a group, interactions that occur among its members shape the knowledge that emerges from the mutual engagement and participation of the group members. Those with a communication and interaction perspective have argued that through discourse and dialectics, individuals shape and re-shape the thought processes of others, eventually leading to a situation of negotiated or mutually co-constructed reasoning for action and knowledge [von Krogh et al.,1998]


3.3 ACTIVITY AS CONTEXT
Instead of examining knowledge Blackler, F. [1995] and others propose that attention should focus on systems through which knowing and doing are achieved. By suggesting an alternative stance of knowing as mediated, situated, provisional, pragmatic, and contested, as opposed to a more classic view of knowledge as embodied, embrained, encultured, and encoded, Blackler recognizes that knowledge permeates activity systems within the organization. Building on Engeström, Y. [1999] general model of socially distributed activity systems, Blackler, F. [1995] proposes that knowledge can be observed as emerging out of the tensions that arise within an organization’s activity systems, that is, among individuals and their communities, their environment (rules and regulations), and the instruments and resources that mediate their activities.

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Ways to Explore Cloud Computing




When people think of the cloud, they often think of software as a service (SaaS). However, the service used to supply technology doesn't define the technology. The following five characteristics are how NIST describes cloud computing.




1.Characteristic: On-Demand Self-Service
When an institution develops or deploys a new application, they first must jump through a number of hoops. For example, if an institution decides they would like to install the learning management system Moodle, they might have to order a server, wait for the vendor to ship it, install the server in the data center, provision an IP address for the server, set up the DNS for the new IP address, install the operating system, etc.


While virtualization tools have improved this workflow dramatically, the process can still be cumbersome. With cloud-based services, many of these steps can be eliminated. Interaction with the service provider is minimized, and with a few clicks of a button, an application can be up and running in a matter of minutes.




2.Characteristic: Resource Pooling
With current systems and data centers, IT departments often get stuck in a silo of their own creation. Institutions rarely share computing resources, and if they do, it is cumbersome to create and manage workflows that utilize these shared resources.


With the cloud, multi-tenancy rules. Users of the cloud can provision computing resources based on their needs, and then destroy those resources, giving them back to the shared pool once their needs are met. Additionally, users can share resources amongst themselves. For example, if an institution has developed a new piece of software and would like to share it with other institutions, they can create a template for that system in the cloud and allow other institutions to use that template as they see fit.




3.Characteristic: Rapid Elasticity
Systems change constantly. To create the best experience for users, IT departments often must scale or update systems to meet user demand. Scaling or upgrading a system currently in production can be cumbersome and resource intensive for an IT department.


The cloud provides ways of rapidly scaling to meet user demand. If a system requires more computing resources, an IT department can easily scale the technology to meet those demands. For IT departments that use the cloud, it seems as if they have an endless supply of computing resources available.




4.Characteristic: Broad Network Access
Traditionally, software like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint has been offered as client-based software. Users have to install software to their computers and upgrade systems to handle the programs. If you're away from your computer, you may not have access to the software, which can cause frustration.


Today, much of the software we use is available over the Internet. Many people believe that having a resource available via the Internet is the defining characteristic of the cloud, but it is just one of the five characteristics.




5.Characteristic: Measured Service
To monitor network, server, and application usage, IT departments employ many different monitoring tools and reporting systems. The cloud, however, allows both cloud providers and IT departments to monitor usage. Cloud providers charge IT departments based on their use of computing resources. On the other hand, IT departments can use these metering (or measured) services to scale resources up and down based on information gathered from these particular tools.

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