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	Time: 22 hours Level: Masters

	Introduction Introduction Resource Knowledge technologies embody formal models of how the world works. If well designed, these models can relieve people of mundane activities and free them up to concentrate on what they do best. At their...

	1 Introduction There are many non-technological dimensions to understanding what it might mean to ‘manage knowledge’. However, technology is a thread weaving throughout, and seems now to be a fixture in knowledge management... 1.1 ‘Technology’? Resource In knowledge management literature the term ‘technology’ is assumed to mean digital media and networks: software and hardware that comprise today's ICTs. However, it is important to remember that pens... 1.2 Pressing questions Resource In the late 1990s, when this unit was first prepared, if you surveyed the field of knowledge management technology you were assailed by technology vendors offering Knowledge Management Solutions. As we... 1.3 Scope of this unit Resource ICT technical developments are announced on almost a monthly basis, so this unit cannot provide an up-to-the-minute snapshot of knowledge management technologies. While we describe many examples of relevant... 1.4 Aims Resource The aims of this unit are:

	2 Core concepts 2.1 Representation, interpretation and communities of practice Resource Let us start with a thought experiment. 2.1 Representation, interpretation and communities of practice continued Resource The preceding discussion brings us to a critical concept introduced earlier: the community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Bowker and Star, 1999). Wenger emphasises that such communities... 2.2 Codification and formalisation Resource Much of the knowledge management literature argues the importance of making tacit knowledge explicit, and then codified. For instance, an explicit goal when auditing intellectual capital is to identify... 2.2 Codification and formalisation continued Resource An important point is that the process of ‘objectifying’ knowledge brings with it a gradual change in the knowledge represented, because content and form are inextricably linked. McLuhan's famous quotation... 2.3 Design implications Resource The difficulties just described have very practical implications when it comes to designing technologies. Consider the following quotations:

	3 Frameworks for knowledge technologies 3.1 A knowledge management technology framework Resource In the introduction to a book on knowledge management technologies, Borghoff and Pareschi (1998) described a framework for organisational memory that has been developed within Xerox to promote understanding... 3.2 Organisational memory systems Resource Without a memory, humans are paralysed in the present moment, unable to reflect on lessons learned or to anticipate the future. You will notice that the heading given to the framework in Figure 3 is corporate... 3.2 Organisational memory systems continued Resource Section 2 argued for a model of knowledge deriving from the situated interpretation of abstract representations. There is an active process by which different interpretations may result from a... 3.2 Organisational memory systems continued Resource There has been a substantial amount of research interest over the last decade in group/organisational memory systems. For example, software researchers have investigated the possibility of capturing design... 3.2 Organisational memory systems continued Resource Nothing can be stored in a computer-supported organisational memory unless it is encoded in some form. Who is going to invest the effort to encode information within an organisation? 3.2 Organisational memory systems continued Resource Group memory systems might be counterproductive if they damage morale or prevent a team from moving on after a failure. Studies of software teams show that many commercial projects are cancelled before...

	4 Mapping technologies to knowledge types 4.1 Technologies and meta-knowledge Resource Meta-knowledge is knowledge about knowledge; for example, ‘I know that I know my age’. Meta-knowledge is crucial for managing our own learning and knowledge. For instance, I need to be able to recognise... 4.1 Technologies and meta-knowledge continued Resource One knowledge management initiative involves HP educators. Bruce Karney is a member of the infrastructure team for the Corporate Education organisation, part of HP's Personnel function. Karney estimates... 4.1 Technologies and meta-knowledge continued Resource Knowledge maps are often one of the first knowledge management representations to emerge, in an effort to add value over the simple corporate intranet search which returns lists of ‘hits’ that are undifferentiated... 4.1 Technologies and meta-knowledge continued Resource The expression ‘the map isn't the territory’ draws attention to the difference between complex reality and simplified models of it. Normally, the territory is relatively stable and different maps are produced... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension Resource In this unit we have discussed the intriguing notion of tacit knowledge, or perhaps better, knowing as a situated process. What might it mean to provide technological support which exploits the tacit... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource Compared to even five years ago (a long time in technology), tools for virtual meetings and workspaces are extremely common now in many organisations, who typically purchase specialist products rather... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource The emergence of the internet and private, higher-capacity corporate intranets makes it possible to ‘broadcast’ (see Figure 7) over digital networks, saving time and money since staff do not have to physically... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource Internet meetings and broadcasts can be easily recorded and replayed because everything is mediated digitally: the text of emails, the audio stream and the slides used. However, face-to-face meetings are... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource Once war stories have been told, the stories are artefacts to circulate and preserve. Through them, experience becomes reproducible and reusable. 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource A non-technical approach has been adopted within NASA. It was found that seasoned engineers, astronauts and other staff had memorable stories of lessons learned, but which were poorly known. In addition,... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource The two briefings in Boxes 4.10 and 4.11 illustrate other technological approaches to supporting socially based forms of knowledge generation, with the common theme of facilitating negotiation and debate... 4.2 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued Resource Communities of practice are technical and social networks which set the context in which new knowledge arises in daily work, and determine how it is shared and interpreted, what counts as important knowledge... 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge Resource Knowledge-based systems have the ability to analyse specific kinds of information in order to take action. Since we have earlier defined knowledge as arising out of the interpretation of information as... 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource Metadata is descriptive data about data. This has also come to refer to a way of tagging documents (on the Web or any other repository) with structured, descriptive information. For example, to... 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource We noted earlier that, in philosophy, an ontology refers fundamentally to ‘being’, or ‘what can be’. In the field of artificial intelligence the term ‘ontology’ has been appropriated to mean a ‘reusable... 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has defined a vision of the Web's evolution into the Semantic Web: 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource A software agent is a program that displays a certain minimum level of autonomy – it acts as a surrogate for a human user. An agent does something for the user automatically, when given instructions. The... 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource Data mining refers to techniques for analysing databases or information systems to try to identify hidden but significant patterns that are not possible to detect by standard querying of the database. 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource The following examples give a taste of what is now making the transition from research laboratories into commercial products. Large hierarchical information structures are extremely common, whether in... 4.3 Technologies and explicit knowledge continued Resource In the future we will see the fusion of statistical analyses of documents, agents, ontologies, metadata and informal annotation/discussion. Ontological tagging with metadata would allow authors to express...

	5 Conclusion 5 Conclusion Resource Knowledge technologies, as software systems, embody formal models of how the world works: for example, networks between people, what their roles are, how information should flow, rules about interdependences...

	References and Acknowledgements References Resource Acknowledgements Resource

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