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Knowledge Management Technology for Decision Support: an empirical examination
Get PDFThis paper reports the results of an empirical examination of the effectiveness of one type of knowledge management technology, namely 'contextual knowledge repository', for supporting individual decision makers in a predictive judgement task context. 31 volunteer subjects participated in the study. The results indicate that a given technology was fairly useful, but insufficient to maximally enhance individual decision making. On one hand, subjects were found to extract more knowledge and make significantly smaller decision errors than their notional naive counterparts. On the other hand, subjects tended to extract less knowledge and make significantly larger decision errors compared to notional optimal counterparts. These findings suggest that individuals could potentially benefit from those knowledge management technologies that would provide additional explicit analytical and procedural knowledge, or those that would facilitate sharing of tacit knowledge through interaction with others. Future research is necessary to address these issues
From Medieval Philosophy to the Virtual Library: a descriptive framework for scientific knowledge and documentation as basis for document retrieval
Get PDFThis paper examines the conceptual basis of document retrieval systems for the Virtual Library in science and technology. It does so through analysing some cognitive models for scientific knowledge, drawing on philosophy, sociology and linguistics. It is important to consider improvements in search/ retrieval functionalities for scientific documents because knowledge creation and transfer are integral to the functioning of scientific communities, and on a larger scale, science and technology are central to the knowledge economy. This paper proposes four new and innovative understandings. Firstly, it is proposed that formal scientific communication constitutes the documentation and dissemination of concepts, and that conceptualism is a useful philosophical basis for study. Second, it is proposed that the scientific document is a dyadic con-struct, being both the physical manifestation as an encoded medium, and also being the associated knowledge, or intangible ideation, that is carried within the document. Third, it is shown that major philosophers of science divide science into three main activities, dealing with data, derived or inferred laws, and the axioms or the paradigm. Fourth, it is demonstrated that the data, information and conceptual frameworks carried by a scientific document, as different levels of signification or semiotic systems, can each be characterised in ways assisting in search and retrieval functionalities for the Virtual Library
Ethics in Research
Get PDFIn order to reflect on some ethical improprieties which I had committed during the data collection phase of an information systems research study, I conducted an heuristic and psychologically-oriented self-study. As part of this heuristic reflection, I engaged in a number of self dialogues in the form of a conversation between various characters. Reported in this paper is one of these dialogues, concerning broad issues of ethics and research and discussing the notion of wisdom, maturity, meaning, and virtue. Ethical considerations are always of primary importance, and I would assert that this is even more so when considering research investigating and using new media, such as the world wide web, in which acceptable ethical practices have yet to be established and consolidated
A Holistic Approach to Knowledge Management and Social Learning: lessons learnt from military headquarters
Get PDFThis paper reports on research conducted by the Enterprise Social Learning Architecture (ESLA) team of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. The ESLA team is investigating collaborative social learning within the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO). Social learning is tightly coupled to knowledge management. Three studies in three different settings have been conducted to date. The studies have provided multi-layered findings about social learning, and validated the use of ethnography for this purpose. Preliminary findings are discussed in this paper in terms of identified enablers and motivators for effective social learning and knowledge management. Although the paper deals with the defence environment, the findings can be generalised to other organisational settings, as the study deals with understanding the issues inherent in building sustainable and adaptive learning organisations
Scalable Fault-Tolerant Location Management Scheme for Mobile IP
Get PDFAs the number of mobile nodes registering with a network rapidly increases in Mobile IP, multiple mobility (home of foreign) agents can be allocated to a network in order to improve performance and availability. Previous fault tolerant schemes (denoted by PRT schemes) to mask failures of the mobility agents use passive replication techniques. However, they result in high failure-free latency during registration process if the number of mobility agents in the same network increases, and force each mobility agent to manage bindings of all the mobile nodes registering with its network. In this paper, we present a new fault-tolerant scheme (denoted by CML scheme) using checkpointing and message logging techniques. The CML scheme achieves low failure-free latency even if the number of mobility agents in a network increases, and improves scalability to a large number of mobile nodes registering with each network compared with the PRT schemes. Additionally, the CML scheme allows each failed mobility agent to recover bindings of the mobile nodes registering with the mobility agent when it is repaired even if all the other mobility agents in the same network concurrently fail
Studies in Organisational Semiotics: an introduction
Get PDFThe broad application of semiotic approaches to organisations has been considered by a number of information systems academics to be a necessary advance in information systems theory (see for examples Land 1985, Rzevski 1985, and Tully 1985). Along with psychology and sociology, semiotics is considered to be a foundation discipline for information systems within the IFIP WG 8.1 FRISCO Framework (Falkenberg, et al eds/ 2000). Semiotics examines the processes of production and consumption of meanings in organisations, institutions and society, and their underlying mechanisms by means of what Pap (1991, 47) refers to as a "...systematic analysis of patterns of interpretive behaviour". Although often unacknowledged, meaning is central to any definition of an information system. While the concept of meaning and meaning making is difficult to define, semiotic theory can assist by emphasising the distinctions between 'information', 'meaning', 'sense' and 'reference' for example (see Noth 1990, 92-102). Eco (1976, 8), provides a broad definition of semiotics as the study of "...all cultural processes as processes of communication". Cultural processes are interpreted to include organisational contexts and processes thereby providing a link between systems and organisations. Most applied semiotic studies start by identifying or defining one or more models of the sign as the basic unit of analysis. Signs are usually glossed as 'something that stands for something else in some capacity or another'. Depending on the model of the sign, mention may be made to an entity for whom the 'stands for' relationship applies. For a discipline often defined as the 'study of signs', there are a plethora of distinct sign models from which to choose. The reader is directed to Winfried Noth's Handbook of Semiotics for a detailed description of different sign typologies, sign models and disciplinary history (Noth 1990, 79-91). The period of modern semiotics starts at the beginning of the 20th Century with the emergence of two independent traditions. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure represents one of these traditions. Considered to be the founder of modern linguistics, he is also a pivotal figure in semiotics by distinguishing the former from the later in Cours de linguistique generate (1916)- a volume assembled from lecture notes edited by colleagues and published three years after his death (currently available as Bally, Sechehaye and Riedlinger eds/ 1993). The other tradition is represented by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, a founder of symbolic logic as well as an expert in philosophy, mathematics, and many other fields. Peirce developed a pansemiotic view so all-inclusive and elaborate that the definitive, chronological collection of his work called the Peirce Edition Project remains unfinished, only six of an estimated twenty volumes of have been published to date (see for example Houser et al eds/ 1999). Other semiotic traditions exist. There are semiotic forms of linguistics - referred to here as semio linguistics - which adopt a semiotic theorisation of text rather than using an explicit sign model during analysis. Examples include text semiotics, systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1978, 1985; Martin 1992) and systemic semiotics (Fawcett 1986). There is also at least one influential form of semio-linguistics that does uses an explicit sign model (Hjelmslev 1943/1963), while Social Semiotics (Kress 1985; Hodge and Kress 1988) develops concepts of discourse, text and social subjectivity based on the 'social sign' of Bakhtin (see Todorov 1984). Despite the obvious applicability to information systems of a discipline that concerns itself with the study of 'patterns of interpretive behaviour', there have been impediments to more vigorous interchange between semiotics and informatics. There are several contributory reasons for this situation. A major contributory reason is that Western semiotics likes to trace its lineage back to the Stoics (approximately 300 BC to 200 BC) and the Epicureans (300 BC to 0) through to the Enlightenment and onto the 19th and 20th Centuries. Faced with this daunting history, and a diversity of researchers, theories, and terminology to rival the most entrenched of modem disciplines, it is not surprising that a casual 'dip' into the literature might prove unproductive. Moreover, as semiotics is centrally involved with understanding communication, it becomes obvious that many commonsense notions of what constitutes communication would need to be reconsidered. As a consequence, semiotics unusually needs to employ meta-theory of one form or another, which leave it open to charges of obscurantism and elitism (Sless 1986, 2). However, it is unreasonable to assume that the constructs used to explain and examine such complex and taken-for granted cultural phenomena must necessarily be simple. Another major contributory reason is the difficulty of locating semiotics within any single discipline- semiotics is inherently trans-disciplinary. Broad application domains have included, but are not limited to, the cultural constitution of subjectivity, criticism and knowledge, communication and perception. A sample of subjects using semiotic theory of one form or another would include cultural and literary studies, film criticism, feminism, political science, legal studies, town planning and architecture, anthropology, biology and genetics. Moreover, there is considerable debate about what constitutes the core criteria that defines semiotics (Pap 1991)
Maritime Work and Communication
Get PDFThis paper presents findings from the project "Elastic Systems" under the Danish Center for Human Machine Interaction. The project aims at developing methods for analyzing dynamic maritime work processes and for designing flexible instrument interfaces that will support changing work environments. Here I only address the former issue, the design issues being published elsewhere, e.g. in Andersen(1999) and Andersen & May (2001). More data can be found in Andersen(2000). The purpose of the present paper is twofold: (1) to present characteristics of maritime work and communication, and (2) to suggest a conceptual framework that covers communicative as well as non-communicative acts.
The latter purpose is motivated in two ways. Theoretical motivation: we know that language is self-referential, so that it can speak of non-linguistic entities like ships and waves as well as its own properties, such as the correct wording or style. The easiest way to accomplish this is for language to treat both domains in a similar way. The other motivation is more practical: it is a fact that communication and physical actions are interwoven in maritime work, and a theory that builds on a sharp distinction between these two kinds of behaviors will miss this basic characteristic. The data is from a voyage aboard Sally Maersk from Algeciras to Goteborg and back to Rotterdam. We recorded 60 hours of high quality video, and the paper builds upon a 16 hours trip from Felixstowe to Rotterdam, supplemented by data from simulated voyages in the simulator at the Danish Maritime Institute. The conceptual framework is based on Lind 1994 and Lind 2000 and distinguishes between the following types of action types:
(1) Prevent(suppress, avoid): if I hadn't done it, then an undesirable state would have developed. Prevent drifting by using auxiliary rudder.
(2) Maintain: if I hadn't done it, then a desirable state would have disappeared. Maintain course.
(3) Help: a positive state would have developed anyway, but I/something made it happen faster/more efficiently. The wind helped us moving the ship to quay.
(4) Create(produce): if I hadn't done it, it wouldn't have happened. Turn on the thrusters.
(5) Destroy (remove): if I hadn't done it, a undesired state would have persisted. Stop engine.
(6) Let: it will happen even if I don't do anything. Let the ship slide into berth without using power.
The meaning concept implied here is a modal one, since all action types are defined by means of counterfactual statements: what would happen, had we not done anything, a course of events termed "passive projection" in Ryan 1991. This modal conception of meaning is among the stock of trade in structuralist linguistics: meaning units are constituted by means of differences and are defined negatively against units that are possible now, but not actualized. Saying that something is blue is to negate that it is green, brown, yellow, etc.
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has a meaning definition very much in agreement with this. To Luhmann, meaning is a specific mode of experience: namely that human experience, although always filled with a specific actual content, is still aware of the possible contents that are left out:
Experience experiences itself as variable [...]. It does not find itself closed and self-contained, not restricted to itself, but is always referring to something that is at the moment not its actual content. [...] The problem of integrating the actuality of experience with the transcendence of its other possibilities remains inescapable, and inescapable, too, is the form of experience processing that accomplishes this. It is this that I call meaning. Luhmann 1990: 25
A linguist would say that meaning is structured in paradigms only one member of which can be chosen, while the rest of the paradigm is present for the consciousness and affects its actual contents.
Meaning is also characterized by its immense complexity that cannot be handled by the individual system:
The most important feature of the differentiation between Actuality and Potentiality found in experience
resides in the character of the overabundance of possibilities, which by far exceeds what can be realized
through action or actualized in experience. Luhmann 1990: 26
Therefore, actualizing a specific meaning presupposes negating the rest.
The constitution of this world of not-yet-actualized potentialities, which is constantly given and accompanies all experience, rests on the specifically human capacity for negation..[...] Negation appears [...] to actually constitute the universality, i.e. the world reference, of all practical life — especially where experience or action is directed positively toward some particular meaning and intends it under the form of "is" or "ought". Luhmann 1990: 27- 2
The New 'Knowledge Speak': the implications of contested definitions of knowledge and information
Get PDFThis paper presents a critique of notions of information and knowledge found in the management literature and amongst proponents of 'knowledge management' (Davenport and Prusak 2000) interviewed in the course of a study of changing operations of the Federal Government of Canada vis a vis the 'knowledge-based economy' as it is found in Canada (Shields, Taborsky, Jones, and O'Hara 2000). Interviews with a range of Federal Government Departments and Agencies on a number of topics including knowledge management were conducted throughout the Summer of 2000. During these interviews a number of competing definitions and numerous misunderstandings of the relationship between knowledge and information emerged. We will distinguish and contrast these with definitions derived from semiotic and information science frameworks. We argue for the importance of the collective and processual nature of knowledge. Our conclusions allow us to specify the shortcomings of existing knowledge management approaches and to identify a necessary and specific focus for future knowledge initiatives in organizations
Ontological Analysis of Integrated Process Models: testing hypotheses
Get PDFIntegrated process modeling is achieving prominence in helping to document and manage business administration and IT processes in organizations. The ARIS framework is a popular example for a framework of integrated process modeling not least because it underlies the 800 or more reference models embedded in the world's most popular ERP package, SAP R/3. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation model for evaluating modeling grammars such as those constituting ARIS. It reports some initial insights gained from pilot testing Green and Rosemann's (2000) evaluative propositions. Even when considering all five views of ARIS, modelers have problems representing business rules, the scope and boundary of systems, and decomposing models. However, even though it is completely ontologically redundant, users still find the function view useful in modeling
Tasks and Methods for Software Maintenance: a process oriented framework
Get PDFThe paper proposes a framework of various tasks involved in the software maintenance process. The work reported in
this paper disassembles the complex process of software maintenance into tasks as to aid in the allocation of resources, acquisition of appropriate tools, and distributing responsibilities of the software maintenance process. The associated toolsets, methods, input-output sources, and communication protocols between tasks are addressed in this paper. This work is intended to conveying a high-level understanding of the software maintenance process and its dimensions. Software maintenance can be viewed in various ways depending on its purposes, nature and characteristics. We also show that software maintenance and development are two separate processes, but they are highly interrelated and interdependent. We attempt to find the intersection of activities between the software development and maintenance processes in the final part of this paper, and the software maintenance process is integrated with the development process into a high level software life cycle model