Critical IS Management Issue - Issue Identification and Definition: Information System for Collaborative Learning
From Information Systems at Pitt Business
Critical IS Management Issue - Issue Identification & Definition Download as PPT[1]
Information System for Collaborative Learning
When a business growing up, with expanding its employees, a company need a structure system to collect everyone’s intelligence and share or transfer within the company to improve the company learning and performance. Also, the structured system can also preserve precious knowledge in a long-term no matter the turnover of the employees.
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[edit] Knowledge Management (KM)
Since 1995, Knowledge Management (KM) became an established discipline. with a body of university courses and both professional and academic journals dedicated to it. Knowledge Management ('KM') includes a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning, and Knowledge Management programs usually are tied to organizational objectives and are intended to achieve specific outcomes, such as shared intelligence, improved performance, competitive advantage, or higher levels of innovation.
Most large companies have resources dedicated to Knowledge Management, often as a part of Information Technology or Human Resource Management departments, and sometimes reporting directly to the head of the organization.
The emergence of Knowledge Management has also generated new roles and responsibilities in organizations, such as Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) and Personal knowledge management (PKM). A chief knowledge officer is an organizational leader, responsible for ensuring that the organization maximizes the value it achieves through "knowledge" whereas a personal information management (PIM) focused on individual skills, their roles and their career development.
[edit] Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management (KM)
While Web 2.0 became an emerging technology for whole the world, company can use it as communication tool to facilitate collaboration and sharing knowledge between employees. Web 2.0 includes technologies such as weblogs (blogs), social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services enhance people to interactive with each others. Different from the traditional Web 1.0 which people can only read or download information, Web 2.0 allow users to upload content as well as to download content. Define an issue: To find out the efficiency of collaborative learning using Knowledge Management system and the effect under Web 2.0 technologies. The discussion of this issue will focus on companies which already conducted Knowledge Management system, find out the performance improvement within different departments under the implementation of Knowledge Management system and define the key person and budget requirement for a Knowledge Management system. Moreover, the discussion of this issue will include the influence of Web 2.0 to current Knowledge Management practices.
[edit] Fundamentally difficulty of issue:
1. Hard to define the success of a Knowledge Management
- The success of a Knowledge Management requires cooperation from every level within a company. Top management team need to support the develop of the Knowledge Management by approving sufficient budget and human resources and other employees need to be willing to share their intelligence with others.
- The success of a Knowledge Management System involves a lot of aspects, from defining required contents, finding sources, collecting intelligence pieces, managing intelligence pieces, to ad hoc access to intelligence pieces.
- A successful Knowledge Management System needs a long-term commitment from employees because employees need to document their experiences or research result in the past in the beginning of the implementation of a Knowledge Management System and keep documenting their work currently.
2. Hard to link the success of a Knowledge Management to the improvement of performance.
- Knowledge Management is to manage the intangible intelligence in to tangible pieces; however, these intelligence pieces can help a future project to success or can avoid the big mistake in a future project but are hard to evaluate their practical benefits to a successful project. Also, the relationship between Knowledge Management and business outcome is not just a pure cause-and-effect relationship because a successful project outcome requires the coordination of different resources input, and the knowledge is just part of it.
- The value of intellectual capital is hard to be defined and it is also hard to transfer a data into wisdom to help a project success.
[edit] Key Person Involvement:
The vision for the knowledge management is the long-term strategy for a company and it will drive the knowledge management initiative and provide the scope within which the knowledge management effort and the organization will grow. Also the vision should include the core beliefs and values of the organization.
The creation of the vision can be done in two ways. Top management can either appoint a chief knowledge officer (CKO), who will create the vision, or top management can create a vision and entrust the CKO to carry it out. Also, it is very important that the employees of the organization are allowed to share in the making of vision of the organization. This will create a sense of belonging for the employees, and allow them to participate in the change process. It will also make them accept the change process more readily than if they were not allowed to participate in it and also encourage them to involve the implementation.
Following are key persons and their responsibilities for implementing knowledge management:
CKO
Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) is an organizational leader, responsible for ensuring that the organization maximizes the value it achieves through "knowledge". CKOs can help an organization maximize the returns on investment in knowledge (people, processes and intellectual capital), exploit their intangible assets (know-how, patents, customer relationships), repeat successes, share best practices, improve innovation, and avoid knowledge loss after organizational restructuring. A capable CKO must have skills across a wide variety of areas since a CKO is mostly the person to create a vision for the knowledge management initiative. As a result, a CKO must be good at developing/understanding the big picture, advocacy, project and people management, communications, leadership, teamwork, influencing, and interpersonal skills to implement a successful knowledge management system. The CKO who successfully combines these skills is well equipped as an excellent agent of change for their organization.
CEO & other Top Management team
The implementation of a knowledge management system will bring in big changes for a company and also requires tremendous resources input. Thus, awareness of the important of knowledge management and the support of the implementation of a knowledge management system from CEO and other top management team will be critical to the success of a knowledge management system.
IT Department and HR Department
Most large companies include knowledge management as a part of IT Department and HR Department since it either requires IT infrastructure to manage the intelligence piece or employee involvement. Thus, the support from these 2 departments is important. Also, a CIO and HR manager will be a qualified CKO candidate because they have more relevant knowledge for the implementation of a knowledge management.
Also, besides the involvement of above key persons, the input from employees and the corporate culture are both very important for a company to implement the Knowledge Management. How do above key persons create a culture for every employee to commit to the implementation and willing to share their intelligence, research result and experience to enhance others to gain the knowledge and improve the business performance as a result will be an important issue to build a successful Knowledge Management System.
[edit] Career Plan & Research
Professional Profile
Professional Development Plan
Industry Profile - Online Virtual World
Firm Profile - Linden Lab
Information System for Collaborative Learning:Information System for Collaborative Learning
Critical IS Management Issue - Current Knowledge and Background: Information System for Collaborative Learning
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