KM&KPM

Performance Improvement at KISR (PI@KISR)

2008-06-17T07:17:00.001-07:00

http://www.waset.org/ijhss/v1/v1-3-22.pdf

Ten Steps to Making KM works

2007-07-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

By Carl Frappaolo, 2006:

1- Define the community.
2- Define a strategy and critical success factors.
3- Execute a knowledge audit.
4- If necessary, execute an ROI.
5- Determine the right approach to knowledge leadership for your organization.
6- Identify and agree upon the core competencies of the organization.
7- Take an inventory of the knowledge sources the community uses, and those it does not use.
8- Determine the quality of existing informal knowledge practices.
9- Build an ecosystem ripe with incentivization.
10- Supply an infrastructure and the means to improve.

A book to read

2007-07-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

Hello all, I recommend the following book for all:

"Knowledge Creation and Management", New Challenges for Managers, Author: Ichijo Nonaka, ISBN 0-19-515962-4

Enabling Knowledge Creation

2007-07-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Hello all, I am now in Scotland and I am reading a very nice book titled: "Enabling Knowledge Creation" for Georg Von Krogh, Kazuo Ichijo, and Ikujiro Nonaka. The book identifies 5 enablers for knowledge creation namely, Instill a knowledge vision, Manage conversations, Mobilize knowledge activists, Create the right context, and Globalize local knowledge. Knowledge management in this book is about social arrangement at the organisation, it's merely about giving Care and establishing Relationships.

Knowledge Auditing

2006-01-02T17:05:00.000-08:00

Dear all, could you please inform me on organisations, institutes, companies, or any links on knowledge auditing. I would like to learn about success and failure case studies, besides we at KISR would like to get training on knowledge auditing. What we are mostly interested in is expertise of knowledge auditing in the middle east.

Thank you

e-Learning vs. KM

2005-12-10T03:40:00.000-08:00

eLearning vs knowledge mgmt
Author
Verna Allee
Published
Tue, Sep 27 2005

At those big training conferences, I love wandering the exhibition halls. Most of the old-line stand-up training companies have either disappeared or languish in lonely obscurity in dark corners, relegated to some undesirable low budget spot uncomfortably near the trash bins. Hogging the choice spots these days are the big glitzy elearning booths with multi-media showstoppers, swarms of fresh-faced sales people, and dazzling lists of offerings and features. Not the least of their attractions are innovative giveaways such as boldly emblazoned psychedelic gel markers and chocolate in myriad forms.

Im not merely trying to learn all the latest gizmos, buttons and whistles. What I most enjoy is actually talking to the people who eagerly staff the eLearning booths and tallying up the dizzying number of misconceptions, conceptual leaps and outright hoodwinks they innocently bandy about. I especially relish chancing upon the elearning booth that suggests they have the ultimate knowledge management solution. Hmm, really?

Upon closer investigation, I rarely find anyone at the booth who even can define what they mean by knowledge management. At the huge Training 2000 exhibit, I found only two people who had read a book on knowledge management. No one had read anything on intellectual capital (only the most powerful new thinking about business strategy and learning of the last fifty years) or, they would blithely reassure me that developing elearning courseware allows a company to manage "all" its knowledge.

I dont think so. Most elearning companies really offer training management, not knowledge management. There is a very big difference. eLearning could be a cornerstone of knowledge management but most elearning companies have failed to master the basic theory and practice of knowledge management. They not only cannot intelligently speak about knowledge management practice from a marketing perspective, they dont even have a coherent internal understanding of knowledge management or a serious knowledge management strategy of their own. Nor can they speak the language of business results other than in terms of ROI (return on investment), completely missing the huge strategic impact of intangibles and intellectual capital measures.

A couple of months ago, as I wandered that exhibit hall, talking with people from literally every major elearning company, I found the prevailing language of elearning was focused around "build and distribute." How is that different from the classic industrial age production line model of design, build, and deliver based on old assumptions about expertise and learning?

How could elearning companies expand their offerings to offer real knowledge management solutions? How would this classic training model have to change if we really incorporate knowledge management principles? What does it mean for the kinds of features and services elearning companies will need to offer or partner with? Lets see.

1. Its not just about ROI, its more about building intellectual capital. Knowledge and learning is a much bigger business story than return on investment can capture. Traditional ROI concerns efficiency and cost reduction - the classic industrial age way of telling the business story. The newer and more powerful way of telling the story about knowledge and learning is to focus on intellectual capital and build the capacity for the future. Intellectual capital is not jargon or a buzzword. There is a whole body of very serious thought and practice essential for anyone who wants to make a strategic case for investment in learning.

What this means for elearning? Marketing teams and consultants need to master this new language of knowledge management and intangibles. Check out the recommended books and resources list on my website or browse the articles there. Want a really rich learning site? Go to Karl-Erik Sveibys website. Karl-Erik is a founding father of both knowledge management and intellectual capital.

2. Its about learning communities as well as individual learners. Knowledge is a social phenomenon. We learn through experience, application, and conversation in community with our peers. We are on the verge of an explosion of interest in communities of practice and knowledge networks. Read Etienne Wengers book on Communities of Practice, or he and Bill Snyders article "Learning in Communities" in the last issue of LiNE Zine, or John Seely Brown and Paul Duguids The Social Life of Information. Chief Knowledge Officers and Chief Learning Officers are putting more and more focus on building learning communities. This learning frontier is one that few elearning companies are addressing intelligently. (Please note: a community is not a portal or software.)

What this means for elearning? Build in the capacity to profile whole communities of people. Companies need ways to make the experts more visible to each other and to the entire organization. Some elearning companies are getting the picture very quickly. Docent, for example, has a built-in model for developing skill profiles and links to human resource information systems databases, such as PeopleSoft. Look for more features that will help people pull up a variety of demographic profiles like "weather maps" that show the distribution of skills across entire communities and populations or even communication linkages.

3. Experts are everywhere. The prevailing assumption built into most elearning models is, "We know what is best. We will tell you." The usual design process includes identifying the subject matter expert or experts as partners in the design effort. Seems to make sense if that were really how knowledge happens. There are two challenges here. First, only the most routine of processes and procedures really lend themselves to training and job aids, including elearning. The non-routine or more expert levels simply cannot be captured in readily taught formulas. More advanced levels of knowledge and skills are learned in tacit ways, by actually hanging out with the experts.

Second, any expert will tell you that people usually dont follow a process or formula or steps. They want to tweak it or put their own spin on it. People, however, will support what they help create. So the real "experts" are the entire community that needs the knowledge, creates it, identifies what is most valuable and continually renews, validates and revamps it. Burck Smith, reporting in the May/June 2000 issue of e-learning magazine reminds us that "when distributed learning or technology replaces a highly formative or socializing environment distributed learning and technology perform poorly."

What this means for elearning? Ultimately this means putting the means of production of knowledge (and the elearning modules that spin out of that) in the hands of those who need it - the communities of practice and expertise within the company and the extended enterprise. This requires a radical rethinking of how courses (web or otherwise) are really created. Just as most elearning is focused on the individual learner, most design work currently focuses on an individual expert. Upfront work with the learning community is far more important than most elearning companies realize. eLearning service providers can contribute more consulting support to really identify the community of users and the community of experts. Then they can build in ways to work with that community through the life of the elearning module to assure that it is relevant and continually updated.

4. Quality learning requires quality knowledge objects. Fully appreciating and utilizing the community of experts and users is the surest path to high quality knowledge objects. A knowledge object is any document, schematic, drawing, tool, software, job aid, or guide that helps people do their work. Too frequently training courses use obsolete materials or irrelevant examples. The best of elearning is built around or linked in directly to the actual knowledge repositories that are continually renewed and updated by the learning community.

What this means for elearning? Peer3, a recent spinoff from TSC is expanding their offerings beyond elearning to include people-to-people profiling, people-to-knowledge capability as well as people-to-learning modules. They are creating ways for real communities of practice and user groups to create real-time knowledge objects that can be rolled into elearning modules. For example, instead of a diagram being dropped into an elearning module, the module may link directly to a repository or website that is a real-time resource for a community of workers.

For elearning providers to really support knowledge management, they would expand their focus to learning communities and link to the real-time knowledge object repositories that people use in their daily work. A more complete knowledge focus would mean having the capacity to:
* Connect people to people in ways that build learning communities
* Support learning communities in creating knowledge objects
* Connect to those knowledge objects in elearning modules
* Create expertise and learning profiles of the community...

How many of these steps in creating, socializing, and applying knowledge do you really support? Do your product and service offerings cover the whole spectrum? Then you can indeed claim to be well on your way to helping companies leverage their knowledge assets.

Verna Allee is an internationally recognized thought leader in knowledge, intangibles, and new business models.

Knowledge Production Workshop @ KISR

2005-09-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

Thanks and appreciation to all who participated in the workshop held at KISR between 26/9 and 28/9, 2005. The speaker Mark from Columbia University was very enthusiastic to meet the gentlemen from various departments at KISR. He spoke about the fundamentals of knowledge production and what it requires to be working in a KP organisation. The workshop involved team exercises which helped participants understand and recognise what it takes to work as a knowledge producer. Participants learned that cooperation, understanding, and providing chances between employees and superiors are essential prerequisites for successful and yet effective work plans and projects. I will later list participants' comments and their suggestions about the workshop.

This is my birth of interfacing on the blog's avenue

2005-09-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

Greetings and blessing to all who are with Dr. Hasan Al-Matrouk to invite me here to blog along within your realm of thinking and dreaming. Visions are born from such encounters. I look forward to our dreaming's creative power to be harnessed into tangible value of eternal nature. The efficient use of time, thoughts and interaction is the interest I seek to develop in joining you all here, until the wisdom of guidance begins to grow a natural diplomacy of universal creativity, innovation and service to the sanctity of life.
Here is the most current position that I posted from the threshold of the slipstream from our lower reality into dream into reality...

Benoit Couture , 29-Aug-2005
Ripe timing to assemble H2g2-BBC-CBC's live democracy
Stay at home dad Benoit Couture
Dear cyber hosts and neighbors,
With the work I do on my space with h2g2 as a stay at home dad with no income of my own, I am offering a volunteer initiative to begin now during the present labor dispute at the CBC (Canadaian Broadcasting Corp) to join with the BBC to gather the owners of the 2 corporations into a local-global complicity to update democracy from self-destruction to sef-control to community self-government. Is it conceivable to make use of h2g2 as the spark plug to ignite the healing movement of quietning silence of patient wisdom on the air from our live, cyber democracy?
England has taken the best of Europe to the farthest extremities of the world and England has also dearly suffered to protect the world from the worst of Europe. From Avalon to the return of the King of kings, the world monarchies have now received lessons of grand humility when needed and of humble grandeur to express the solemn beauty of being servants of the justice and of the peace that secures liberty. Because of Great Britain, all languages of the earth are now offered a practical guide to self-governing to live out the universal Faculty of being human. Because of the Commomwealth and because of the entity of terror-anti-terror working at circling the earth under militarization, humanity is given the opportunity to end the repeat of history's worst memories and to restructure the distribution of wealth with integrity and equity. Canadians are inviting her majesty, Queen Elizabeth to join us in the company of the BBC, to preside over the gathering of the Permanent Pepople Summit to officialy launch"...cleansing our vision of the Crown,,,", with the help of Mr. Bush, President of United States of America and of Benedict the 16th, head of Vatican. As we do, we shall behold the rise of Britania and of Europe's inheritance, joining with the inheritance of Asia into humanity: The muli-culture of humans, rooted in the glory of unity...YES into AMEN...
(to view h2g2's filtration of my invitation, please vivit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/F30859?thread=879493
Thank you for the opportunity!

BIRTH OF THE INTERNET CATALYSY TO JOIN AND TO SIDE ALONG IN THE ASSEMBLING

MINCIU SODAS'S SEAL OF ETERNITY

Now that the www is growing, is it conceivable to open the kdw from Ethical Public Domain (EPD). kdw stands for the "kingdom deep web" and offers a universal access to persoanl health and happiness in the settlement of collective harmony and balance throught out the depth of the www's activity.
By entering EPD, one is hosted into the 0 area of the self where God meets intimatly each human in the Quietning Silence of Patient Wisdom. No and Yes are available to be accessed and to personally be suited for any need of the moment. As the need is met, satisfaction is given the opportunity to join in the ebbs and flows of kdw by the Law of the Spirit of life Who sets us free from the law of sin and death.
The gentle spread of kdw from person to God to person sweeps www into the Alpha and Omega where flows the regenerative inner waters of faith and hope, in the organic simplicity and glory of unity, spiritual and physical.

WELCOME, VISION OF ONGOING COMPLETION OF THE KDW FROM MINCIU SODAS' LAB TO THE ETHICAL PUBLIC DOMAIN...

So dear Dr. Hasan Al-Matrouk and co-bloggers, I thank you for the opportunity to join in your company of the mind. Beside loving my love ones faithfully, I see no better opportunity to draw the human race on the peaceful journey from stranger to the sanctity of family, than with the transparency that offers the open source of knowledge management, just as we aim for here.
Benoit17

Sep 18, 2005
Meeting of the humming bird with the eagle

It's the story of a daring humming bird who once noticed way, way down below during one of his 35,000 feet high migration journey, an eagle.
He thought to himself: "Hummmm....if I can see that eagle from here, it means that he is a lot higher than any other eagle."
The humming bird decided to go for it and he broke his migration pattern and went straight for the eagle.
The humming bird was so high that once he made his move, he had time to think about his introduction to the eagle.
He thought to himself: "I'll go for broke. As I get closer, I'll line up my flight in sync with the moment when he'll just have reached his focus of attack on a prey and I'll come right at him to clip his flight out of its track. Without hurting him, I'm going to give him the sense that from above, this minuscule little bird could have struck the mighty eagle with a death blow."
It worked.
At first, the meeting with the humming bird was frustrating, because of the obvious frailty of this tiny thing managing to spook him so much. At first, the poor eagle had nothing but questions that he could not even formulate.
All of that reaction happened in the eagle's mind, at the frantic speed of the moment's shock. The humming bird was in control of the shock treatment and he quickly re-assured the eagle that the point of his unusual entry was to make sure that he got the eagle's attention without compromise.
The humming bird settled the moment by looking at the eagle straight in the eye with a confident smile and said: "It worked". The eagle burst laughing and they started cruising around each other, learning to fly together at the most elementary level. After all the emotion was past, they landed for a break and then the real conversation began.
"Why did you come to me like that, you little sneak of power?" -"I had never seen an eagle flying so high before and I just had to see you from closer".
The eagle had learned to fly higher than any other because of his father who had taught him how to live in the science of perpetual development. His dad had prepared the eagle to adapt with new winds and had taught him that winds turn to currents at a certain altitude. The dad had run his course before he could really learn to go with his son, all the way to where these currents make a real difference.
The humming bird explained further, "Once I started going for you, I realized that we can help each other if we exchange the service from our strengths."
"What have you got in mind?"
"Your eyes for my protection when I come for my season here and when I go on my migration, I am going to expand your vision ten fold by showing you the way up from winds to currents. So then when you ever need to escape plain sight of survival and to climb into the controls that command your winds, you'll then have such freedom. Who knows, we might end up one day with humming eagles and vice versa."
They burst again into laughter and the eagle told him to get on his back and to hang on...and zoom they went and a new vision was born.
Their creation of a renewing vision began to be noticed by all other local animals and soon, the entire environment and ecosystems began regenarating.
The focus of the eagle and humming bird coming together, fired up such local beauty that it began flowing from the winds of change to the currents of conversion and transformation of every speices.
The earth never looked the same, as civilisations had found the path from micro to macro, by going from ignoring and competing to learning from each other to complete mutuality in the reciprocity of one another's vision, with the currents of reality that rules the winds at their mutual altitude.

My thoughts on local experience (Latvian)

2005-09-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

Best theory is practice, learning by doing.
It’s not easy to design system for the job in hand involving main creative actors – knowledge workers – in what could be defined KM, or in KPM.
A majority of experts used to work in their own mental systems; they think that “have no time” to redefine themselves for a new research/ new team work.
It’s hard for many to recognize interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary domains (the schools and universities mainly teach and deal with disciplines), to look forward to/ understand/ embed in one’s own tacit knowledge new notions or definitions, issues, frameworks (often given only in Non-Native language, but the language (knowledge language !) is the powerful instrument of thinking and knowledge creation).
It’s not easy to find in newspapers, also at websites examples of learning by doing with regards to phenomenon of our world – KM and KPM. Examples of good practice, particularly of knowledge work in multicultural teams are of significant importance.
KM and KPM processes designed and evolving in international teams could be perceived as a promoting factor for better understanding of eternal knowledge universe, of Spirit-Nature-Man.

design for tomorrow, plan for the next decade

2005-08-31T14:27:00.000-07:00

Dear KPM blog readers,

I am writing this as an open letter to explain the larger frame of reference in which I think about knowledge production management. Although most of my work and training is concerned with day-to-day management systems and functions, I do not believe that any such KPM program that is implemented can ultimately be successful unless it is goal driven; unless, at a fundamental level, the program is designed to seek challenge and seek the best in us in a way that borders on the impossible. Only by creating performance parameters that challenge the very paradigms by which we operate can we truly innovate at a global level. What do I mean by this? I mean that whatever cognitive and learning factors affect our capacity to be creative as individuals are contextualized and limited by the scope of the goals that we create. When I think of the role of KISR, for example, I think of it in the largest possible way: as a gateway for the future of Kuwait and the entire Gulf region: from creating a new global standard in solar energy production to creating a portal that draws on Islam's rich legacy of astronomy to turn the middle east into a hub of knowledge production in the field of space sciences to creating a new standard for high speed desert rail and/or transport services. In short I think of things that no one else has done and pose the simple question: why can't it be done here?

Without a concrete vision of that future, whether it is 3 years or 30 years distant, knowledge production management cannot function. Although a lot is currently being written about innovation management from top business schools such as Harvard, such works always presume that the functionality to be innovative already exists, that it merely has to be managed. In reality, the thing that makes some companies and institutions capable of creating globally new innovations that create paradigm shifts is very hard to reproduce precisely because it cannot merely be packaged and managed. The real process of producing and turning knowledge into real products and services occurs at the mental level - and it is there that companies and institutions must seek to understand themselves. The whole purpose of the workshops that we provide is to catalyze, not just a moment, but an entire framework and process of change itself.

Principles of Knowledge Production Management

2005-08-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

First - a note to Dr. Hasan Al-Matrouk. Thank you for creating this Blog. The power of a community of educators and thinkers in this field is a critical part of the overall re-engineering of knowledge production in institutions.

As an entry point for discussion, I would like to provide the following basic principles that have, thus far, guided my own philosophy, research and work in this field. I am posting them so that they may be challenged and tested, proven and refined to the point that they provide a clear pathway for the companies and institutions alike in their quest to create new knowledge.

Principle 1: Innovation, as a functional, scalable and repeatable process cannot be outsourced or purchased. The steps that an institution takes to be fundamentally more innovative cannot be consumer-based functions. Acquisition of technologies can aid in the structuring and accessing of information, but it is the unique function of the human mind to discover knowledge.

Principle 2: Knowledge management is fundamentally different from knowledge production management. KNowledge management is a software driven process. Knowledge production management is a cognitive process. Without restructing the way the human mind interacts with the environment around it, knowledge production capacity cannot be altered.

Principle 3: The creative mind, as the engine of knowledge production and its application in new products and services, cannot function optimally in pre-determined pathways. For a company or institution to be creative, it must create systems that are probabilistic. Desirable performance parameters can be specified, but the roads that lead to them cannot be. Anytime pathway preference is demonstrated through a system, the system will tend towards stasis and homogenization drift.

Principle 4: The class of functions that apply to the production of knowledge are primarily limited by environmentally situated cognitive factors. In other words, for a given environment, the largest obstacle to the production of knowledge will always occur at the cognitive level - at the level of motivation, mental mapping, learning and analysis. The primary class of solutions that can, therefore, enable optimal conditions for knowledge production, will stem from creating changes at the cognitive level.

Knowledge management in the Petroleum Industry

2005-08-16T23:24:00.000-07:00

The petroleum industry has seen drastic changes in the past few years influencing all its sectors, including production, drilling, and refining, which in turn has great effects on their marketing strategies, production strategies, and R&D strategies. Keeping up with these changes can only be achieved through effective knowledge management, which include both knowledge production or generation and knowledge sharing or distribution.
I found some interesting examples of how some of the biggest Petroleum companies in the world are handling their KM activities, thought they might be of interest :

KM & British Petroleum: A Historic Example of the SAIC KM Approach
http://www.saic.com/km/who.html

BP's knowledge management approach is encompassed by a simple framework, which describes a learning cycle – before, during and after any event – which is supported by simple process tools. The lessons arising from that learning loop are agreed and distilled by a community of practice – peers across the organization who have a stake in agreeing and defining BP's best practice. Finally, the lessons – both specific and generic are incorporated into "Knowledge Assets" on the corporate intranet, where they represent a living focus for BP's experience around strategic and operational areas

BHP Petroleum Selects FootPrints to Provide Centralized Help Desk and Knowledge Management Support

http://www.unipress.com/pr/bhppr.html

EDISON, NJ (October 13, 2000) – UniPress Software, Inc., a leading provider of issue tracking and help desk software, today announced that BHP Petroleum is using FootPrints, an award-winning, web-based issue management and help desk solution. FootPrints provides a scalable, low-cost solution to track, manage, and report issues and activities, while building a comprehensive knowledge base online for fast, easy reference by help desk technicians and customers. Installed at BHP's Information Services (IS) Department in London, the FootPrints solution has helped streamline data management, allowing users to easily log, track and manage BHP's daily production and exploration activities around the world.

Storing and Harvesting Massive Data Sets

http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2004/06jun/kozman.cfm

Three-D seismic and the explosion of processing techniques that have continually made the data more useful are a vital part of today’s exploration and production projects -- but this proliferation has created a problem for oil companies: What to do with all that data? One of the first successful implementations of hierarchical content management, at Chevron Overseas Petroleum Inc. in San Ramon, Calif., at what is now the ChevronTexaco Upstream Technical Computing Center.

ChevronTexaco's Soft Sell

http://www.cio.com/research/knowledge/edit/k030403_chevron.html

Oil field professionals discover the beauties of KM technology for themselves.
In the dawning days of the petroleum industry, managing an oil field was primarily an exercise in brute force and muscle power. That's not the case today, where making the most of an oil field is a knowledge-intensive affair involving expertise in engineering, earth science and facilities maintenance. At ChevronTexaco, software is helping the company improve how its teams of employees manage the assets in oil fields by enabling employees in multiple disciplines to easily access and share the data they need to make decisions.

KMNews@KISR

2005-08-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

Effective Collaboration for better Knowledge Production and Management

By
Dr. Hasan Saleh Al-Matrouk

This is not a point of view; it is definitely a research and a controversial issue. At KISR a research institute, we started to take the topic “knowledge management (KM)” very seriously since the announcement, sponsorship, and support of KISR management. Every organisation (which consists of people, processes, information) needs to be aware of what goes around inside and outside with respect to issues related to the workplace in order to be distinctive and competent. But, how well an organisation survives and prevails still remains a question that needs to be investigated or better put “researched”. Let’s ask ourselves this important question: How do we make our workplace a desirable environment and ready for producing and sharing knowledge (KP), and yet continuing to be successful? Effective collaboration is the answer. There are social requirements for collaboration, among which are trust, solidarity, team work and spirit, equal rights and giving chances, delegation, management support, and human behavioural aspects. Much of which, the entire previously mentioned are culturally defined and could be analysed and certainly motivated. Let us not dwell into that, but what needs to be researched and then clarified in a well investigated framework, is what socially constitute better knowledge production and then management. We as employees of a research institute need to acquire the awareness of our work behavioural aspects besides our interaction with each other when we communicate and collaborate. We do not just want to formulate ideal suggestions and recommendations. On the contrary, we need to study the work social aspects and produce a motivating and a practical guideline for us to follow in order to collaborate effectively. This is a social research study that will involve all users at all levels at our organisation. Undertaking such a study will necessitate knowing the social aspects of the workplace, which are explicit and implicit. For example, availability of people, their hierarchical positions, their activities, their relationships with each other, how they interact, and what they produce are some of the explicit. These explicit social aspects can be explored and recorded. Implicit social aspects like solidarity, spirit of team work, and trust are hard to establish but never impossible. These social aspects need to be understood thoroughly and also phrased out simply for effective collaboration. Until this awareness becomes evident, KM and KP still remain vague and unreachable.

Knowledge Production

2005-07-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

"The results from the studies indicate that supporting people in knowing about othersâ€™ activities and availability would be more important when supporting knowledge sharing, than a specific knowledge system with the purpose of storing information to be reused as knowledge."

Dear all, awareness of people's social aspects at the workplace (Availability, Activities) will help them communicate and collaborate. In addition, these awareness issues need to be visible and effortless (that is transparent, and users don't need to search and invoke them). System should support these awareness issues besides information repository and knowledge sharing. Please, comment.

Thanks

A link to a KM community...

2005-07-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Haentjens Frederik, fhaentjens@kpmg.com. Links to KM are provided:

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/community/zones/sig/incubator.html

KM in Middle-east

Please, feel free to add comments beside any post.

Hasan

What can we do?

2005-07-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

Dear all, please feel free to place comments as of what we can do with this space. Suggestions are welcomed. As a start, we can introduce ourselves, our organisations, share thoughts, and what knowledge can do for us at our workplaces.

I am more interested in e-learning and users' requirements, and knowledge falls in the heart of this subject. Users' requirements, demands,a nd interests are of utmost importance and these should shape up the utilised technology. IT should adapt to our needs, what do you think? How do we eleicit users' requirements? Let's think about that too. Humans are valuable in pushing the technology forward to provide us with means to produce, manage, and share knowledge.

Thanks...

Introduction

2005-07-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

I am Hasan Al-Matrouk and I work in Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research at the EUD/DAS. http://www.kisr.edu.kw . I have created this space in order to discuss issues about knowledge management and knowledge production management. Please, feel free to introduce yourself, your organisation, and your comments related to knowledge and KM.