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Of Humans and their Machines...

"Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think, and suspicious of men who try to." -- H. Mumford Jones

"The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do."

-- B.F. Skinner

• Managing Customer Knowledge (CIO, June 1, 1998) How companies can go about translating data about customers into the business resource that keeps you in business.
• Deep Blue Defeats World Chess Champion: An Occasion for Solemn Concern? (May 12, 1997)
• Will Computers Finally Outsmart Humans? (Time Mar. 10 '97) The story making headlines around the 'Deep Blue' and its new generation of number crunching monolith super computer 'Deeper Blue.' Rematch of the human wits (Garry Kasparov) and the raw machine power will occur in May, 1997, to determine if the creations of humans shall outsmart their creators? Time to worry... Yet? Remain tuned in for more details...
• The Day I Sensed a New Kind of Intelligence (Garry Kasparov)
• Can Machines Think? TIME Cover Story
• The Race to Build Intelligent Machines

Information Processing vs. Sense Making

• Game Plan: Blinded by the Byte (Forbes ASAP, Feb 24, '97) Advances in information technology, coupled with access to exponentially increasing 'information,' are occupying the attention of those enamoured by the availability of all those numbers and the endless ways of slicing and dicing them under the garb of 'analysis.' However, often, the 'quality' of interpretation, sense making and judgement is more important than the 'quantity' of information. Moreover, there is still an important role for the low-tech factors such as intuition, insight and innovation in most decisions of any significance.

Human Side of Knowledge Management

• A Little of that Human Touch: Groupware Systems (CIO, Mar 1, '96) Long ago Dale Carnegie mentioned in his bestseller that even a highly technical job of an engineer requires 85% people skills and 15% technology skills... In case of groupware applications, the numbers change to 95% people skills and 5% technical skills, as per Andrew Whinston.
• Harvest your Workers' Knowledge (Manville & Foote, Datamation, July 1996) To make our organizations' perform, we will need to build systems that support knowledge -- not data. 'Knowledge Management' which implies the notion of controlling people is bound to fail. Manville calls the desirable alternative approach 'post-modern reengineering' to harness the organization's core competencies embedded in the collective knowledge of informal networks of people. Such networks are also known as the 'communities of practice' which Manville defines as groups of professionals "informally bound to one another through exposure to a common class of problems, common pursuit of solutions, and thereby themselves embodying a store of knowledge." Also, see the more recent story by Manville and Foote: Strategy As If Knowledge Mattered from Fast Company magazine.
• Fast Becoming Interactive, Training Isn't What It Used To Be "It is the motivation of the employee more than the method of training that really will drive any kind of training home. If you were interested in something, you wouldn't care what kind of media it was in. You would love to learn about it. But when you start shoving training down people's throats because of the wrong orientation, they are going to resist."

Measurement & Evaluation of Knowledge Assets

• Forbes ASAP Special Issue on 'Intellectual Capital"
• Measurement: Counting What Counts
• Measurement: The Old Rules No Longer Apply
• Measurement: SEC Loves Intellectual Capital
• Measurement: New Metrics for a New Age
• Measurement: You're a Fool If You Buy Into This
• Paul Strassmann on 'Knowledge Capital' (October, 1996) Paul Strassmann criticizes the traditional financial and accounting methods for not accounting for the 'Knowledge Capital' which is primarily embedded in the firm's employees. He points out that unfortunately many companies, under the garb of reengineering, downsizing, and outsourcing, have been seeking short-term efficiency while sacrificing the long-term capitalization of their knowledge assets.
• Intangible Assets Monitor A brief write-up on 'How to Measure Knowledge Assests' based on Karl-Erik Sveiby's work. Also of interest on the LearnerFirst site is another product entitled Knowledge Innovation Assessment. Anyone using these products out there... we will be more than pleased to hear from you about your experience with these products.

What Firms Are Doing About Knowledge Management?

• Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (Jan. 1998) An interview with Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak about their new book.
• 'Giant Brains' Are Thinking Ahead (Foley, InformationWeek, September 9, 1996) The professional services consulting firms view knowledge assets as their key assets, and their knowledge-management environment as the core system to achieve competitive advantage. Increasingly, technology strategy is inseparable from the firm's business strategy, and the thrust is on problem-solving through "thought optimization" with a lesser emphasis on the "scientific method."
• Knowledge Sharing Within Management Consulting Firms (Reimus) Reports on How U.S.-Based Management Consultancies Deploy Technology, Use Groupware and Facilitate Collaboration.

Unravelling Knowledge Management: Intersecting Paradigms

• Economics and the Modern Theories of Cognitive Behavior Some scientists explore the prevailing chasm between economics and modern theories of cognitive behavior. Two issues, however, remain unanswered: first, if cognition should be treated in isolation from affect and action (Bruner); second, the notion of Descartes' Error (Damasio) in considering the primacy of 'rational' over 'affect'.
• Today Locomotion, Tomorrow Chess? Dynamical Hypothesis Meets Cognitive Science The computational/representational model of cognition that underlies GOFAI (good old-fashioned artificial intelligence) is being challenged by a new approach to cognition. The new approach to cognition, also termed as the dynamical hypothesis, proposes that cognitive agents are better understood as continuous dynamical systems that evolve in real time, thus shifting the emphasis from static structures and discrete operations to continuous change.

Data Mining: Creating Knowledge From Data?

"Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information." -- Peter Drucker

• Strike it rich!: Datamining (Datamation, Feb. 1997) This cover story provides coverage of industry case studies of companies that are apparently benefiting from datamining. The hyped benefits include market segmentation, predicting customer churn, fraud detection, direct marketing, interactive marketing, market basket analysis, trend analysis. However, before we jump to any conclusions (pun intended), perhaps we need to remember the difference between data and knowledge.
• Coaxing Meaning Our of Raw Data (Feb. 3, 1997, Business Week) An overview of datamining: the art and science of uncovering hidden patterns. Data mining has its hurdles: the 'meanings' are not suggested by the data or the computers, they are imposed on data by human beings. Can this new technology create meaningful knowledge out of raw data? Hmmm... we are a bit skeptical about the really meaningful questions relevant to unpredictable change, turbulent times and discontinuous strategies. [Seems like Business Week took note of our observation, see their later story on Data Mining titled 'He Who Mines Data May Strike Fool's Gold' in June 16, 1997 issue.]
• DataMining: Excavate Your Data: Data Mining (Datamation May 1, 1996)

Intellectual Capital

• Forbes ASAP Special Issue on 'Intellectual Capital"
• Measurement: Counting What Counts
• Measurement: The Old Rules No Longer Apply
• Measurement: SEC Loves Intellectual Capital
• Measurement: New Metrics for a New Age
• Measurement: You're a Fool If You Buy Into This
• Nurturing: It Comes Down to Two Things
• Practical: Get Smart
• Practical: Here Come the Consultants
• Practical: A Way Too Short History of Fads
• Protection: The "Homebrew" Letter
• Protection: Singapore Sting

Complexity Theory and Knowledge Management