Knowledge Management (LIS-658)

Description: Organizational knowledge is a valuable strategic asset. Knowledge management refers to the systematic management of an organization’s knowledge assets so that they can be leveraged for sustainable advantage. This course examined how knowledge is created, captured, organized, diffused, and implemented in an organization. Topics covered include knowledge management processes and practices, corresponding technologies, collaboration tools, and people and cultural issues.

Thesis

Organizational processes and practices that enhance quality knowledge gathering and utilization are needed to foster increased participation in the information management cycle and further the development of better, more effective information in the organization’s repositories.

Paper

The paper addressing the thesis above: “Identifying the determinants of knowledge management in organizations”

Knowledge Management Blog

I was asked to maintain a blog discussing our developing views of knowledge management as we progressed through the course.  Each blog post had to choose 3 readings selected at random and build upon that foundation weekly. The Knowledge Management section of this site is dedicated to that exercise. Specifically, we were asked to:

• “Write at least 11 blog entries on the WordPress blog sites. Each blog post was to include a critical discussion of three article readings drawn from the reading list. The blogs should be publicly available. Posts should be at least 500 words in length and must include full references for each work discussed”.
• “Use the blog posts to keep notes on the readings, to synthesize thoughts, and to critique the literature. By the third post, link to classmates’ blog posts and draw connections between what they are reading and what you are reading. Do not wait for your classmates to write entries on the same articles before linking to their posts. Instead, link to each others’ posts based on ideas”

I thought this was a very clever way to get a set of differing perspectives on the topic of Knowledge Management. If you give the class 31 different papers to read, then the likelihood that two students will read the same three papers in any one class is very low. In that way, the whole class gets valid, differing perspectives all around. My first blog post, Knowledge Management taught like Rashomon, is about this idea.

Bibliographic Management (Links to an external site)

We were asked to develop and discuss our efforts to develop a taxonomy of our readings by putting everything on a bibliographic management site (Bibsonomy, in this case).  My discussion of the success of my taxonomic tagging system is discussed in the Progress Report.