Knowledge Management

ABSTRACT: Two separate qualitative research studies are designed to gain an insight into the practice of knowledge management and marketing in the engineering and biotechnology industries. The findings show that the engineering industry is practicing knowledge management to varying degrees. The biotechnology industry clearly differentiates between data, information and knowledge. With the new knowledge gained, the biotechnology industry is able to Innovate and market new products and services. A Knowledge Management System (KMS) model has been used to show how the various components In this paper, I suggest and review four perspectives within the literature surrounding knowledge management (KM) research at the organizational level: information systems, management, organizational learning, and strategy perspectives. Each perspective informs the within the KMS are coordinated and integrated to best achieve organizational objectives in the engineering and biotechnology industries. The KMS model is also used to show how customer-focused organizations use knowledge to market innovative products and services.

INTRODUCTION
Most organizations are now more customer- focused and use knowledge-based strategies to each out to their customers. This is particularly so in knowledge-intensive industries such as the biotechnology and the engineering industries. The biotechnology industry is growing at a rapid pace and is now considered as one of the fastest growing industries in almost all industrialized countries . Knowledge managements overall goal is to build an organization that can see the customer (customer-focused), for it is the customer that drives any business. Unless the customers needs and wants are more than satisfied and their expectations are met, the customer is likely to defect to a competitor. Even satisfied customers are defecting to competitors because the competitor has differentiated and is providing a better service, or quality, or something else better that matters to the customer. Jones and Sasser performed a study to find out why customers defected. They investigated more than 30 companies, in five different industries, with different competitive environments and different types of customer relationships. Their findings on reasons for a shift in customer loyalty were that customers were reasonable but they want to be completely satisfied. If they are not and have a choice, they can be lured away easily. Therefore to be competitive, it is imperative that organizations must be customer-focused. Therefore, knowledge managements overall goal is to build an organization that can see the customer (customer-focused). This article presents the results of

two separate qualitative studies, one in the engineering industry and the other in the biotechnology industry, both taking customer- focused approaches to achieve their organizational goals. Article given by BRAY, suggests that other alternative representations of knowledge as well, to include knowledge as representing a state of mind, object, process, access to information, or a capability. In each case, information systems play roles in supporting the management of knowledge. Additionally, Alavi and Leidner develop a framework for analysis of the supporting role of an information system with KM; specifically four sets of socially enacted, interdependent knowledge processes: (1) Knowledge creation (2) Knowledge sharing (to include storage and retrieval)

LITERATURE REVIEW
THE FRAME OF KNOWLEDGE-

The literature of knowledge management goes back over three thousand years. In the Western world, it began with The Instructions of Amenemopet. Written around 1,000 BC, this book was a training manual for Egyptian civil servants and a guide to wise professional practice. Fragments of this document survive in the Bible. We can still read traces of Amenemopets advice to young managers in the Book of Proverbs. Johnson identifies the wisdom literature of the Bible as intensely practical. The Hebrew word for wisdom chokmah means skillfulness in dealing with the job that is before us, writes Johnson (1998: viii), comparing it with the Greek word techne, the rational application of principles aimed at making or doing something well. Many scholars contrast the wisdom embodied in techne to the wisdom embodied in sophia. The contrast is accurate in a linguistic sense. Browning (1997: 306) describes the writers of the wisdom literature as intellectuals but not in the Greek tradition of speculative philosophers; Hebrew wisdom was exemplified in practical skills, knowledge about how to manage ones life and about the purpose of life. This leads us to an issue that forms the core of knowledge management, the link between speculation and experience, theory and practice, thought and behaviour. This link sustains the process of knowledge creation. The process is embedded in the two phases of a rich cycle. One phase is theorizing. Theorizing transforms tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The second phase is behavioural adaptation. Behaviour transforms explicit knowledge into physical practice. Knowledge creation requires nourishment. Behaviour, practice, and experience feed knowledge along with rational cognition and theory building. Different ways of thinking and different kinds of thought shape organizational knowledge. This interplay requires a cycle that anchors new learning in the behavioural web of situated knowledge. In turn, situated knowledge forms the background to new theory. Practice and reflection, action and theorizing on the results of action unite in effective theory-in-use. Effective theory also considers the system within which we think and act. Consequently, knowing what and knowing how increasingly involve knowing why. The concept of knowledge management has therefore developed a broader and more philosophical frame than most management literature in recent decades.

The earliest wisdom writings emphasize the link between theory and application. If the worthy life requires examination, it is impossible to keep the wisdom of theory thinking and the wisdom of practice doing apart. Since the Greeks, however, some Western thinkers have proposed a division between thinking and doing, knowledge and action. For Plato, the world of thought is an ideal, immortal world. Plato contrasts the world of idea and archetype to the mortal, physical world in which we live. For Plato, the world of human existence is an inferior shadow of that other, superior reality. But something was missing, even in the Academy. Of the three great conceptual approaches to science observation, experimentation, and theory experimentation was unknown to the classical Greek savants. They worked back and forth between observation and theory and therefore lacked the powerful weapon of falsification to prune wrong theories (Morowitz 1993: 161-2). Platos science stood on one leg, Aristotles on two. It was not until the great age of physics that Galileo, Newton and Bacon developed the concept of robust experiment that made scientific progress by stabilizing scientific method with its third leg. No philosophical debate is ever settled swiftly. Some debates rage and smoulder and rage again across the ages. The debates on theory and practice, idealism and realism, thinking and action are no exception. Even so, it seems fairly well resolved that learning precedes knowledge. Individual learning and organizational learningAlthough the process of learning and the nature of knowledge are not completely understood, there is wide agreement that knowledge creation requires experience. Kolbs (1984: 38) definition of learning as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience offers a useful perspective. Any kind of experience may, in principle, be transformed into knowledge. Kolb emphasizes the relationship between experience and knowledge as a dynamic process of continuous reproduction and regeneration. It contradicts the static model of learning as acquiring knowledge external to and independent of the learner. Information and facts are external to and independent of the learner. Knowledge inheres in human beings and the specific form of knowledge is often contingent on the learning process. Because knowledge is human, developing knowledge requires thinking and practice, mind and body both. Mindless recording will not transform experience into knowledge. Learning requires human agency, a concept synonymous with Heideggers concept of care, the human tendency for each person to care about his own existence (Heidegger 1993: 238). For Heidegger, both practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge express of human care in an intimate relationship between action and knowledge. Human knowledge is not only the product of past experience, but the product of anticipating the future. Knowing things involves feed forward as well as feedback, anticipating how things may be used, manipulated or acted on in the future. As children, politicians and scientists all discover, anticipatory knowledge prediction is not always accurate. It is part of the knowledge cycle nonetheless. Kolbs definition of learning fits together with Heideggers concept of care to suggest a model of individual learning that shifts the focus of learning from the adaptation of external behavior to the internal process of knowledge creation. The model outlines the ways in which human beings monitor and control knowledge through three human capacities. These capacities are

1) The ability to act, 2) The ability to apprehend action and the environment, within which action takes place, 3) Critical comprehension. RESEARCH Learning through critical comprehension This process integrates experience into knowledge through cycles of action and feedback. Knowledge, in turn, supports the human capacity to understand present situations and shape future action. Experience is transformed into knowledge in several ways. One is reflection on the past. The other is the strategic judgment that human agents make as they design the future. These judgments link human beings to the environment by projecting future possibilities in a complex network of cause and effect. Things are understood through their perceived positions in these networks. Generalized knowledge The interaction between experience, anticipation, critical comprehension and knowledge is only part of the story. Situated knowledge also relies on generalized knowledge distinct from and abstracted from immediate situations and intentions. Generalized knowledge guides perception and thus it guides action. It is common knowledge shared among groups of actors. Community among actors depends, in part, on shared common knowledge and the shared nature of general knowledge implies a social process. This social process plays a major role in knowledge creation. While individual actors also create generalized knowledge, every creator of new knowledge builds in part on what has come before. Even the greatest individual creators see farther because they stand, as Newton famously put it, on the shoulders of giants. Even individual knowledge creation is thus a social process. Two more aspects of human agency drive knowledge creation, habit and tacit knowledge. Garfinkels (1967) experiments demonstrate that a general store of knowledge is essential even to the most mundane activity. This general store of knowledge depends on many factors. These include habituation, tacit knowledge and the larger social stock of generalized knowledge, together with learning based on experience, anticipation, and critical comprehension. One fascinating aspect of habitualization is the fact that it plays a role in many different theories of knowledge creation. Berger and Luckman (1971: 70-71) write that, All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern ... In terms of the meanings bestowed by man upon his activity, habitualization makes it unnecessary for each situation to be defined anew, step by step. A large variety of situations may be subsumed under its predefinitions.

The knowledge management framework posits knowledge creation as a spiral moving through epistemological and ontological dimensions (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995: 70-73). The epistemological dimension can be portrayed as a spectrum running from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. The ontological dimension describes levels of knowledge moving from individual knowledge through group

knowledge, organizational knowledge and inter-organizational knowledge. Human beings shift knowledge from one frame to another. As they do so, they embrace knowledge, enlarging it, internalizing it, transmitting it, shifting it, recontextualizing and transforming it. Humans create new knowledge by acting on and working with knowledge. Knowledge creation requires social context and individual contribution. Dimensions of learning Intentional human action is sometimes treated as the only influence on social process. While we know that that is not so, the theories-in-use that shape our behavior often rely on purposeful, rational action to the exclusion of other forces. The world of rational intention described by Webers bureaucracy (1969), Fayols hierarchy (1949), or Taylors scientific management (1947) doesnt mirror the rich, developmental quality of human enterprise. These models fail to account for knowledge creation. Despite the acknowledged need for innovation and engagement, we often rely on purely rational, models of organizational development. Rational, technocratic models of organization that neglect the existential role of care and agency in human behavior make knowledge creation difficult. In mistakenly rationalizing emotional factors out of human behavior, bureaucracy tends to kill the innovation and resourcefulness on which human enterprise depends. Evolution has not designed human beings to work as the cogs of a grand machine. The Modern Times visualized in Chaplins classic film suggest the emotional tone of a world void of human agency and the existential caring on which knowledge creation depends. The endpoint of technocratic, scientific management is the gray, bureaucratic world of Whytes (1956) Organization Man. A robust understanding of knowledge and knowledge creation embraces many issues. In addition to generative innovation, purposeful design and conscious adaptation, knowledge creation demands response to environmental change. Behavioral adaptation and the evolutionary feedback of complex adaptive systems is a central force in social process. Evolution, and therefore chance, play powerful roles in learning and innovation. Evolutionary chance involves the element of response to random influence comparable to genetic change in the process of random selection. Biological mutations occur at random under the influence of limited entropy when radiation or other environmental influences affect genetic structure. Shannon and Weavers information theory would describe this as a disturbance in the signal for the genetic code. While this is always a form of signal degeneration, however, some genetic deformations create viable new options for survival and growth. When a new genetic development finds an appropriate ecological niche, it survives to become an evolutionary development. Knowledge often works this way. So do many complex adaptive systems. The process has parallels in human culture and society. New signals change social context, paradigms and world-views. These signals may be purposeful, or they may begin in an unplanned way. They may be the result of signal interference to messages in transmission. They may result from sudden insight. There are many possibilities. When change and chance are embodied in new form, they cease to be random and become evolutionary. Chance is closely allied to experimentation. Feedback from purposeful change, experiment, and chance all contribute to a dialectical progression that spirals upward from tacit knowledge to explicit and back again, crossing levels of learning as the spiral grows. This process closely parallels the growth of scientific knowledge. Before examining the process of social learning in greater depth, we will develop a model of learning that accounts for both critical comprehension and habitualization as aspects of learning. In doing so, we are aware that habitualization is not always seen as a learning process. This perspective violates the notion of learning as conscious effort by the learner, particularly in models that see learning as the

acquisition of external knowledge. Rather than being framed as part of the knowledge creation process, habit is often associated with stagnation and the absence of learning. This can certainly be the case, but it is also clear that comprehending things anew at each encounter is impossible. Habit is as important to human understanding as critical comprehension. The teachers of skills in activities from sports and music to mathematics and surgery are aware of this. The essential learning issue in habit is selecting, developing and rooting habits that serve us. This, too, is why examining patterns and habits is one aspect of learning. Several models of learning involve the twinned process of building new frames of habit while examining current patterns of behavior and belief. These include Schns (1983) concept of reflective practice, Argyriss (1977) concept of double-loop learning, and what Senge (1990) terms generative learning. As we learn to do things and know things, we also reflect on the frame of knowledge itself. Systematic knowledge of what we know must incorporate knowledge of how we know and embrace the value-laden considerations of why we know and why we act. Incorporating habitualization into a model of individual learning offers a richer perspective than earlier models. (Figure 2) While this model fails to distinguish between the modes of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge respectively associated with special and general knowledge, it is a useful simplification. Individual learning The model represents the interaction between two dimensions of two aspects of learning. First, it represents the processual and ephemeral dimension of time in contrast to the enduring dimension of time. Second, it represents the special and situated dimension of knowledge in contrast to the general dimension of knowledge. We will next discuss a third aspect of learning, existence in space. This aspect of learning distinguishes between the individual and social dimensions of learning. Individual learning and social formation Systems theory explains action as a function of social structure. Mainstream theories of organizational learning locate individual learning within organizational entities. In contrast, we view individual learning as one of the processes that transform collective interaction and mutual experience into an aligned and interconnected collective fabric. This social fabric exists over and above the individual. It is an enduring fabric that may be described in terms of Giddenss (1979) concepts of system and structure. Giddenss concepts of system and structure correspond to the situated and generalized dimensions of individual knowledge. Giddens (1979: 66) defines social systems as reproduced relations between actors or collectivities. These are sustained patterns of relationships created by actors with mutual, situated knowledge about each other and their environment. These patterns are produced and reproduced through processes of social positioning (Giddens 1984: 83-92). Individuals align themselves through this process and negotiate critically comprehended experience into networks of mutually acknowledged relations. These relations enmesh individuals in integrated networks of opportunity and obligation. Being mutually acknowledged, they assume a supraindividual quality. In other words, no individual is fully able to define his or her own position within the system. Giddens categorizes social structure as rules and resources representing generalized knowledge shared among individuals. The social system defines an idiosyncratic social position for each individual. The social structure represents shared stores of knowledge that permit mutually understood, regularized

conduct among individuals. Like generalized knowledge, social structure is implicit in social practice. It is generated through social routinization and regionalization in time and space. First, it denotes the creation of socially aligned individual practices. Second, it demarcates their confinement to specific sectors of time and space (Giddens 1984: 60-64; Giddens 1984: chapter 3). The social processes of groups resemble the individual processes that are their counterparts. Routinization and regionalization result from repeated processes of systemic positioning. At the same time social positioning requires the mutual understanding implicit in routinized and regionalized social practices. We may summarize these concepts by locating them within the dimensions of three aspects of learning. These are (1) The ephemeral versus the enduring dimensions of existence in time, (2) The situated versus the generalized dimensions of knowledge which conform to Giddenss distinction between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic (3) Existence in space, the distinction between the individual and collective dimensions of learning. Three aspects of learning In much the same way that individual action and experience are grounded in the specific capacities of human body and mind, social interaction and mutual experience are grounded in integration. Giddens defines integration as reciprocity of practices between actors in circumstances of co-presence (social integration) or across extended time-space, outside conditions of co-presence (system integration) (1984: 376-377). Unlike the human mind and body, this reciprocity has no organic quality. First, it rests on physical copresence, possibly mediated. Second, it requires the existence of mutual understandings implicit in a social structure. Third, it demands the network of active social relations that exist in social systems. These three factors configure individual action and experience into mutual interaction and experience. They lead to the alignment and negotiation of individual strategic judgment and practices into collective processes of social positioning, social routinization and social regionalization. The relationship between individual and social knowledge From information to knowledge Daniel Bells 1967 book on post-industrial society developed two main themes. First, he argued that that the character of knowledge was undergoing significant transformation. Second, he believed that a professional knowledge elite was emerging to manage the new knowledge. Moving from an era of empirical knowledge and practical expertise to an era of theoretical knowledge and technical expertise means that industrial output depends on knowledge-based solutions to an increasingly greater degree. At the same time, we are moving from definitive production concepts to sensitizing production concepts. Developing and using these concepts requires what Bell labelled the professional knowledge elite. CONCLUSION Reflect on many different aspects of knowledge, information and agency. Each has his or her own perspective. In introducing the Norwegian School of Management Research Annual, we wanted to raise a broad series of philosophical questions. We also want to share with you an important idea. Work is one of the most important arenas of human activity. We spend nearly half our waking hours at work or involved in work. Work is a source of human identity and human action, individual pride and livelihood.

Work is far too important a part of human experience to be considered only in the light of social technology. It is an arena for wisdom. Life must be examined to be worth living, and this examination must also frame our working life. In examining work through the perspective of knowledge management, we frame questions and issues on a grand and important forum of human experience.

REFERENCESwww.worldbank.org www.brc.org.uk www.en.wikipedia.org www.franchize.com