Hi All,
I've been listening in for a while now on this list and feel it's time to
introduce myself. I'm educated as a knowledge engineer, but my current
line of work focusses on both knowledge management and enabling
(information) technologies for deployment of knowledge in organisations
(which include, of course, knowledge-based systems but also cooperative
computing technologies like groupware and workflow management systems).
We (I'm working for an institute that aims to transfer knowledge on
innovation of work processes with IT) are busy trying to define methods
and tools for what we call the lessons learned cycle. A lesson learned is
an individual experience that can serve the collective in attaining its
goals. A lesson learned might be positive (dos) or negative (don'ts). This
cycle can be applied at various levels in an organisation and comprises of
the following steps (you might state that the steps parallel the concept
of collective learning):
Forever do:
1. Gathering of lessons learned
2. Analysis of selected lessons learned
3. Consolidation of lessons learned
4. Sharing the consolidated lessons learned
5. Individual learning
6. goto 1.
Each of steps could be operationalised in specific organisations by
methods (e.g. step 1 might make use of the method of organising regular
internal symposia, methods that are in use in social science, assigning
special knowledge facilitator that go around the company finding knowledge
[I remember Roger Schank, an artificial Intelligence guru, saying that he
employs what he calls knowledge indexers]; tools that support these
methods might be e-discussion lists, TQM idea boxes, databases, process
logs,...)
Actually, each of the methods for a step works as a 'filter', selecting,
reformatting, deleting, augmenting the input to that step. What I find
particularly interesting are the 'design criteria' one uses for 'tuning'
this filter.
Question 1: what methods and tools can be used for each of the steps (who
has experienced success and/or failure in this respect)?
Question 2: what are the relations of proposed methods and tools with:
2.1. The kind of knowledge we are dealing with (e.g. highly technical
lessons learned or lessons learned in a law firm)
2.2. Organisational culture, organisational goals (e.g. profit, public
service)
2.3. Anything that I missed!
Hope this can generate a fruitful discussion,
Eelco
-- Eelco Kruizinga Kenniscentrum CIBIT P.O. Box 573 3500 AN Utrecht The Netherlandswork phone: +31 30 308 900 workfax: +31 30 308 999 home phone: +31 20 669 2024 home fax: +31 20 669 0137