Lecture Tuesday 15 February 2005

Comments on articles for today's readings?

We've been talking about the knowledge management paradigm

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/the_knowledgemodel_driven_enterprise.php

Structure is latent & generated, derived, secondary
Arbitrariness

My criticisms of metadata: turtles all the way up
Careful design takes time, and time consumption encourages corporate stasis

If it's a company with a mission, then they ought to be able to divide up tasks, producs, etc.

What about campus course numbering system?
Seems that no one wants to change the numbers assigned...why? Historical reasons...

an accurate class system has non-exclusive classes
model with non-exclusive classes is highly complex & difficult to visualize

Wanting a rational structure is a problem...
1. assumes we can describe things in a rigid structure
2. assumes we can fit these things into a rigid structure, functionally
3. may induce stasis where flexibility is necessary, considering the time-consuming nature of the organization task
4. assumses an organization of people can well-described in terms of a static structure

there's no time dimension...
units are never clear. is a unit a Person? a role?

Hahn, J. & Subramani, M. (2000). A framework of knowledge management systems: Issues and challenges for theory and practice. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Information Systems. 302-312. [e-journal, ACM DL]


artifact person
------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
classify
structured ez roles/
skills
-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+
target of
unstrucured text KM: make it
person indep.
-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+



Personal
information
management
to
enterprise
knowledge
management?

Change management...