Knowledge Management, Communication, and Use

Knowledge Management is becoming a very hot topic. Many organizations and research communities (e.g., engineering, management) look at it as their source of light and are eager to use, study, or tell other people how to use it. In these activities, some organizations find themselves with at least severe burns.
The purpose of this page is to collect information relevant to knowledge management from many perspectives. It is hoped that this will enable better future use of knowledge management and its associated technology and practices.

The Club for Knowledge and DATA Management meets every two months.
If you are interested in getting announcements related to its activities send us your email.

Content:

· Background:

· General perspectives:

· Processes:

· Supporting Technology:

· Tools:

· Additional Information:

· Events:

· Interaction with other practitioners:

· Sponsors:

· Send comments, proposals, or express an interest:

· General Comment on WWW Resources:

· Disclaimer:

This page is currently undergoing major revisions. Most of them will be done before the end of October.

Background:

Knowledge management is yet another term to an eternal problem: creating knowledge and using it for action. Greek philosophers studied this problem. It had to do with the theory-practice distinction (i.e., theoria vs praxis).

Over the years the problem evolved in different ways but retained its essence. Only in the last 30 years, there have been numerous attempts to address it.

• The emergence of Artificial Intelligence in the sixties brought with it Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) technology. The original purpose of this technology was to capture experts' knowledge for its use by non-expert people to solve problems. In contrast to this "automation" perspective, there were two other different movements that sought solutions in some disciplines.
• Total Quality Management (TQM) and with it Quality Function Deployment (QFD) were ways of organizing product design to improve its quality. Creating better product through the use of collective knowledge, rather than the knowledge of single engineers, was the fundamental insight. This knowledge was captured manually using simple diagrams.
• Participatory Design (PD) was another way that sought to integrate users with designers to better design products. It was practiced in the sixties in some places and forgotten until resurrected about 10 years ago, especially in the design of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The insight there was that users also are experts in using tools and need to contribute their knowledge to improve design quality.

Other ideas that have to do with integrating and managing diverse knowledge for action have sprung recently including: reengineering, concurrent engineering, agile manufacturing.

From this perspective, Knowledge Management has quite a bit of history including successes and failures; it is related to many other problems and technologies. Hence, by the time you finish moving the scroll-bar to the end of the page, you will realize that the understanding what knowledge management means is a problem that suffers from information overload. The problem is not lack of information about what can be done in knowledge management, but which of the too many ideas, methods, tools, perspectives, disciplines that are involved should be selected for a particular situation. The problem is to digest this voluminous information and put it to action.

Knowledge management practitioners have developed very few proposals for general frameworks that organize the information on knowledge management. One such proposal has been developed and will be presented in an upcoming workshop.

General Perspectives:

This section provides information about some recent perspectives related to the management of work with particular emphasis on engineering work.

• Quality Product Design (QFD, etc.)
• Quality Resources Online
• QFD Institute World Wide Website
• Yoram Reich's summary page
• ISO 9000
• Agile Manufacturing/Agile Design
• Agility Forum - Agile Consulting Services
• Agile Manufacturing Initiative
• Machine-Tool Agile Manufacturing Research Institute
• Concurrent Engineering
• DFM Project List
• GE Corporate Research and Development Manufacturing Technology Laboratory Homepage
• NASA Concurrent Engineering Home Page
• GE Concurrent Engineering
• ORNL Concurrent Engineering
• ALGOR Concurrent Engineering Handbook
• CERC

Processes:

• Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)
• Reengineering Seminar
• BPR Online Learning Center: Papers ans studies on BPR.
• The Change Management Toolkit for Reengineering
• Software Reengineering Web Home Page
• times since September 1997. Current loading time

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If you have any comments or questions regarding this page, please send email to yoram@eng.tau.ac.il

Copyright © 1997 Yoram Reich

Page URL: http://or.eng.tau.ac.il/topics/km.html

Last modified: Wed Dec 27 12:57:28 "IST 2000