Jetter / tter / Kraaijenbrink Knowledge Integration

The Practice of Knowledge Management in Small and Medium Enterprises
1. Auflage 2006
ISBN: 978-3-7908-1681-5
Verlag: Physica
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten, Web PDF

Reihe: Business and Management (R0)

The ability to manage knowledge is relevant for millions of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that operate in high-tech environments. They strongly depend on external knowledge about customers, technologies, and competitors because, as opposed to large companies, they have limited internal knowledge resources and little power to control their business environments. Present KM literature, however, mainly focuses on large companies and therefore does not explain, how SMEs, for example, can successfully apply groupware, data mining, semantic networks, and knowledge maps. This book addresses this problem by introducing the concept of knowledge integration (KI) that places emphasis on the identification, acquisition and use of external knowledge. Drawing from this theoretical basis, the book presents concepts and instruments specifically designed for SMEs, as well as examples of their implementation and use in practice.

Zielgruppe

Professional/practitioner

Autoren/Hrsg.

tter,

Kraaijenbrink, Jeroen

Schröder, Hans-Horst

Wijnhov, Pons

Jetter, Antonie

Wijnhoven, Fons

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Knowledge Management: More than a Buzzword.- Knowledge Integration by SMEs — Framework.- Knowledge Integration by SMEs - Practice.- Organizing the Toolbox - Typology and Alignment of KI Solutions.- Elicitation — Extracting Knowledge from Experts.- Codification — Knowledge Maps.- Detection — Electronic Knowledge Retrieval.- Assessment — Making Sense of It All.- Transfer - Knowledge Transfer in Networks.- Motivating — Incentive Systems for Knowledge Provision.- Supporting Knowledge Integration at SMEs — The KINX Portal.- Supporting Knowledge Integration at SMEs — Policies.- Wrapping It All Up - Past, Present and Future of Knowledge Integration.

Leseproben

5 Elicitation – Extracting Knowledge from Experts (S.64)

Antonie Jetter

Chair for Business Administration with focus on Technology and Innovation Management, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, [e-mail]

5.1 Motivation and Introduction

The activity of elicitation – the explication of unarticulated latent knowledge that the knowledge owner might not even be fully aware of – is an important first step for many knowledge activities, such as codification and transfer of knowledge. Elicitation requires that people are conscious of and successfully express their knowledge and that their expressions are adequately represented and interpreted.

Cognitive psychologists have long been interested in learning and have therefore developed methods to research what people know (knowledge contents), how their knowledge is organized in the human brain (knowledge structures) and how content and structure change in the course of time. Though many of the research methods they use have been adopted in other areas (e.g., marketing, managerial cognition, expert system design), they are still relatively unknown in the field of knowledge management (KM).

Furthermore, some elicitation methods that have originated in psychology are applied in KM with very little consideration for their theoretical background and application domains. Consequently, the knowledge that is captured in KM practice is sometimes only an insufficient representation of expert knowledge. This chapter will briefly discuss the psychological perspective on knowledge elicitation, and its value for knowledge management (Sect. 5.2), before it presents elicitation methods for three distinct steps in the elicitation process (identification of experts, activation and capture; interpretation and documentation) in Sect. 5.3.

In Sect. 5.4 it will then present a case study of a high-tech SME that has applied the elicitation techniques of episodic interviews and free word association for building ontologies for knowledge search and retrieval.

5.2 A Psychological Perspective on Knowledge Elicitation

5.2.1 Theoretical Background

Many researchers in cognitive psychology are primarily interested in the structures of knowledge in the human brain. It is widely accepted that the brain follows the principle of cognitive economy and organizes related knowledge content in struc- tures that can be easily accessed and processed as an entity. Elicitation results (e.g., the speed and order of a test person’s statements) are used to infer these structures [9].

Models of knowledge structures vary greatly. One very influential idea of knowledge organization, e.g., grounds on the notion that de-contextualized knowledge about facts – so-called semantic knowledge (e.g., historical data, the members of the European Union, the differentiating characteristics of mammals) – is organized in network structures. These knowledge structures consist of verbal concepts and propositions about them and are usually represented through graphs, with concepts being the nodes and relations being the edges. The sentences "A tree is a plant", "Plants need sunlight", "Oaks are trees" for example, contain four concepts (tree, plant, sunlight, oaks) that are linked through the relations "is a", "need", and "are".