Knowledge Life Cycle

As the title means it is a cycle that has no end. It describs how you compose the knoledge processes. As I mentioned in the "What is data,information and Knowledge"article there is no knowledge exist without information therefore the knowledge life cycle begins with information acquisition. from there it goes through several process and finally it comes to distribute the knowledge. but it has no final event since information has been changing all the time.basically knowledge life cycle has five steps as follows.
knowledge acquisition
knowledge modelling
knowledge annotation
knowledge reuse
knowledge maintenance
Further more we can have much extensive idea of the knowledge life cycle by studing following categories.
Information Acquisition
Individual and Group Learning
Knowledge Claim Formulation
Knowledge Claim Evaluation
Knowledge and Information Broadcasting
Knowledge and Information Searching and retrieving
Teaching
Knowledge and Information Sharing
The Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base
references:
Firestone, J.M., (2002), Origin of the Knowledge Life Cycle
Firestone, J.M. and McElroy, M.W., (2005), Doing Knowledge Management
Millard, D.E., David, Tao, F., Doody,K., Woukeu, A., and Davis H.C. (2006), The Knowledge Life Cycle for e-learning

What is Data, Information and Knowledge.

These are common terms that everyone using in day today life. From these three terms I think Data and Information sounds like same for many people but it is totally different words but one depend on other. I think it is like a series of connected links
Data <-> Information <-> Knowledge
More further it is connected to WISDOM
Data
According to the wikipedia(2009) data defines as this but Gene Bellinger et al,(2004) described in much formal way that data is something that just exist without any meaning, it may useful or not.

Even though different people describe data using different set of words almost all the definitions and descriptions are more or less the same. Data is the very first level of the next levels, those are information and knowledge. By other words data is the building block of information, knowledge and wisdom. Having said that and by looking at all the definitions I can say data is there for knowledge that means without knowledge, data is useless.
For an example in Middlesex University, person comes to each and every class door and count the number of students in the class. He is doing this for every two hours. He is collecting this data because he is advised by the knowledge source. This knowledge guides you to collect data.

Information
Business dictionary gives you a good definition of Information. Israel and John, (1990) tried hard to distinguish data and information. According to the Wilson, (2002) information is relevance data arrangement to the recipient. Having looked at the definitions information can be commentated as something that can be useful and meaningful to someone and also it is to be understood.

For an example "14th of February" it makes no sense, it is just a data. but if add some value to this data it become an information. "14th of February is the valentine's day that celebrate lovers all over the world". Further more when we consider above example of the Middlesex University data collection that go through some process and analyse the class room settings and the free times of the class rooms’ also large rooms that has only few students and vice versa then it will become information for decision makers.

knowledge
Knowledge is what you know about the particular field that is practical and theoretical understanding. Also define as knowledge gain by experience and education (wiki, July 2006). I agree to this definition of wiki because we gain knowledge analysing information. Education and experience gives us information.

According to Reany (March 1988) Knowledge is interaction between concepts and concepts means mental objects. Also there are two object types as physical and mental. Read more
Interesting thing is in this article, he mentioned that “knowledge does not exist without a knower, and there is no such thing as "unknown" knowledge” (Reany, March 1988). It makes sense that knowledge is create within individuals because there is no unknown knowledge and also further he said there is no absolute definition for knowledge.
For an example my teacher has some knowledge on his own and then he has taught me and I got some knowledge as well but it is not the same as my teacher’s knowledge. There is some knowledge in between but that is not the unknown knowledge that is the knowledge that my teacher has but I don’t have. Knowledge can not be transferred as it is but information can so based on same information everyone create knowledge in there own mind according to their capacity.

Wilson (2002) said that knowledge is mental process that how well mind can understand and learn which goes into mind and it is only done by the mind itself. He simply expressed knowledge is what we know. Read more

Considering all the definitions of knowledge it is hard to afford absolutely pure definition of knowledge but word itself sounds “know” that means it is all about what we know. Knowledge might be worth might not be worth because I believe knowledge is created individually and it is based on information what you acquire from other sources. It can be education, experience or even a little chat between friends. Everyone’s knowledge is based on their mental capacity. People analyse information up to their capacity and then create knowledge within their mind. According to that what we know can be wrong. Then that knowledge is defined as inadequate knowledge.

Knowledge is the next level of information that means when information is processed, out come is knowledge.. As far as I know intelligent people have more knowledge than others because they have more analytical skills than the others. you can read more on this in my previous article

Why can not gain the same marks in the exam? Even though all students have same facilities and same lectures at same times still unable to obtain same marks (Assume they studied same hours at home as well). Different students have different level of mind set that means different level of knowledge. Even if they have identical information flow in, still they organise those information in different mind frames which results different expression of the knowledge. Knowledge is a very important thing in human life.

Is there anything that more important that knowledge?

"Imagination is more important than knowledge" (Albert Einstein, Man of the Century)

References:
Chmielecki, A., What is information, Last accessed 25 February, 2009 at: http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cogn/CognChmi.htm

Israel, D. and Perry, J. (1990), What is Information?, Information, Language and Cognition, ed Hanson, P. Last accessed 25 February 2009 at: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry/PHILPAPERS/whatisinfo.pdf

Reany, P. (March, 1988) What is Knowledge?, Arizona Journal of Natural Philosophy, Volume 02, pp 7-14, Last accessed 4 February 2009 at: http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_knowledge.htm.

Thilina, K.V. (January, 2009)Basic Idea of Knowledge Management, Thilina's view on Knowledge Management, Last accessed 03 February 2009 at:http://thilinakm.blogspot.com/2009/01/basic-idea-of-knowledge-management.html

Titsworth, S. and Soukup, C. (April, 1998), Definition of Data, Data, Last accessed 24 January 2009 at: http://www.unl.edu/speech/comm109/Toulmin/data/index.htm

Wilson, T.D. (2002) The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’, Information research, volume 8, No.1, Last accessed 4 February 2009 at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html

Basic idea of knowledge management

I would like to describe "Knowledge management" as it means by two words those are what is knowledge and what is management. Knowledge is interpretation of information as individuals according to their capacity(Thilina, 2009).read more. Management is an activity that arranges resources in order to get desire outcome.

Considering knowledge and management separately we can have an idea of knowledge management as a phrase. Knowledge is the recourse that is being managed. Let's see What is knowledge management? and Can knowledge be managed?

Since we are in knowledge age there are gurus for knowledge management and most of them define knowledge management in different aspects those are mainly organisational, economical, technical and IT.

Knowledge management is the most efficient way of secure knowledge in order to achieve the organisations success using the maximum of the knowledge assets (wiig, 1997). He is emphasis on knowledge personal knowledge, knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. As I experienced those are essential in terms of knowledge management.

Switzer (2008) also have the same kind of definition about the knowledge management and he came a cross some interesting literature such as “Knowledge Age”, ”Knowledge manager”, ”Knowledge Worker”, and ”Knowledge Reader” He is Describe knowledge management in practical terms. Interesting thing that I found in this article was he said that in order to secure on knowledge management is not successful to apply on hierarchical structured organisations it should me reorganise in order to gain maximum harvest of knowledge. (Switzer, 2008)

Considering definitions of Hicks et al (2006), Joseph et al (2005) they also came up with similar ideas and literature such as creation, utilization, sharing, and codification and so on. Even if most of the experts think in similar manner T.D. Wilson has different perspective of knowledge management.

Knowledge can not be managed only the information can be managed (Wilson, 2002). He further mentioned that so called knowledge management is only another term like 'team-building' , 'cultural change' , 'strategic information systems', 'benchmarking' but people do nothing on it. read more

I was working on a BPO project for three months of period and it was a hierarchical organisation. We were as employees had to listen what our headman said, In that organisation management not fully benefited from employees in terms of knowledge management because they did not listen to lower level thoughts of structure. Still we did knowledge management in our level. We were the people who doing the task so we got together discussed the trouble-free ways of achieving our goals. This means we did community of practice without knowing the phase. We share our knowledge and did the task up to the expectation. As far as goal was achieved headman do not worry how we could did that.
I have supported Switzer (2008) article with this experience, actually organisation did not recognise knowledge worker. If company did that our knowledge could be shared amount the every one of the organisation and made out of most of the knowledge and also can apply knowledge management model in practice. I suggest it should be reorganised as a flat structure organisation rather than hierarchical organisation.
Aslo I agree with the wiig(1997) because because as in this scenario we shared, transferred and finally we created knowledge to achieve given task.

As far as concern on the individuals' knowledge I agree with the Wilson’s (2002) thoughts. According to me he had only thought about individual knowledge management. Yes, it can not be managed, because as individuals we create knowledge in day today life even when we are walking on the road. We are not able to manage all the knowledge we have in our mind. Some times we have knowledge that retrieves on moment such as an accident which may happen once in a life time. Did we manage this knowledge to come out in particular moment? No, even we do not know we had that kind of knowledge Wilson (2002).

Organisations do knowledge management by sharing individuals’ knowledge. I disagree with the Wilson’s position when we come to organisations. Because organisation has a specific goal to achieve and they have a strategy for that goal, more importantly there is more than one person. In such a scenario we should manage our knowledge in order to gain full use of the employees of the organisation.

Can knowledge be managed?

Yes, knowledge can be managed. There are knowledge management models, life cycles and frame works those stuffs make lives easy for knowledge management but again it depends on the situation. I think it is much effective in the small organisations rather than the huge organisations (in terms of employees).

For an example in our module itself does knowledge management. Last year there were only 23 students (If I am right)and they posted four articles for their course work 1 and also they had comments regularly from our module leaders. I feel that they went though knowledge management model tacit to explicit, explicit to explicit and explicit to tacit. Students convert their tacit knowledge to explicit and then discuss on the class with the module leaders (explicit to explicit) and from feedbacks and class discussions helps to convert explicit to tacit knowledge and again re write the article (tacit to explicit) that went as a never ending loop.
In this year we have the same course work same marks but only three articles with one week feedback. Does it make any difference?
It may be, Module leaders changed the knowledge management application according to the situation but still it effects to the organisation. My point of view marking three rather four will effect on student knowledge and again late feedbacks effect to the productivity of the articles.
But according to the situation organisation has done maximum, they have analyse the current situation and changed the strategy more or less and also just did the adjustment on knowledge management application.

Finally I can say larger the organisation, slender the knowledge management.

References:
Hick, R.C., Dattaro, R. and Gaulp S.D. (2006), The five-tier knowledge management hierarchy, Journal of Knowledge Management, 10(1): 10-31

Joseph G. Davis, G.J, Eswaran Subrahmanian, E and Arthur W. Westerberg, A.W., (2005), The ‘‘global’’ and the ‘‘local’’ in knowledge
Management, Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(1): 101-110

Switzer, C. (2008), Time for change: empowering organizations
to succeed in the knowledge economy, Journal of knowledge management, 12(2): 18-25

Thilina, K.V. (January, 2009),What is Data, Information and Knowledge. Last accessed 07 February 2009 at:http://thilinakm.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-datainformation-and-knowledge.html

Wiig, K.M. (1997), Knowledge Management: An Introduction and Perspective, The Journal of Knowledge Management, 1(1): 6-14

Wilson, T.D. (2002) The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’, Information research, volume 8, No.1, Last accessed 4 February 2009 at: http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper144.html

Basic Idea of Social Network

Social Network can be define many ways. However, it is ultimately collection of Individuals, collection of people. We have social networks even in childhood. We have relatives and friends and we communicate each other that makes a social network. Individual becomes a member of a social netwok or many netwoks. if we consider above example the way we are interacting with friends is not the same way that we are interective with our relative. Which means we already members of two networks.(wiki, 2009)

As a result of Information Communication Technology (ICT) Social Networks expose to internet users as well, then it becomes Online Social Network. For an example facebook and myspace are famous online social netwoks. now you can understand how fast these network can be expanded. For an example if you have university group, and assume one of your university group member is a very good fan of the facebook or myspace, then it will be introduced to you and you become a member of another social network then you can interact with more that people than before and exchange ideas academic stuffs and everything and anything.
http://www.whatissocialnetworking.com/

you can have more idea about social network by looking at this video


http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking

Thilina talks to you!!!

This is my first time in blog.. wow.. it feels nice...

I am a Sri Lankan and I have been in UK for three months and also I am a student of Middlesex university doing my masters right now. this is my second semester just start with a blog. what a nice way to start a semester.

I have selected this course (Business Information Management System) because it is interesting to do Quality Assurance as my job in the future. I have some working experience as a Software Engineer but I like to move as a QA.

In this semester it could be realy a interesting three months for me because it has two subject which is I like very much one is Knowledge Management Strategies and the other one is Information System Quality Management.

Here will be some more interesting articles sooner rather than later.