CHAPTER 11: Knowledge Management and Specialized Information Systems
Knowledge management allows organizations to share knowledge and experience among their
managers and employees.
Knowledge is an awareness and understanding of a set of information and the ways that
information can be made useful to support a specific task or reach a decision. A knowledge
management system (KMS) is an organized collection of people, procedures, software, databases,
and devices used to create, store, share, and use the organization’s knowledge and experience.
Explicit knowledge is objective and can be measured and documented in reports, papers, and
rules.
Tacit knowledge is hard to measure and document and is typically not objective or formalized.
Knowledge workers are people who create, use, and disseminate knowledge. They are usually
professionals in science, engineering, business, and other areas. The chief knowledge officer
(CKO) is a top-level executive who helps the organization use a KMS to create, store, and use
knowledge to achieve organizational goals. Some organizations and professions use communities
of practice (COP) to create, store, and share knowledge.
A COP is a group of people or a community dedicated to a common discipline or practice, such as
open-source software, auditing, medicine, engineering, and other areas. Obtaining, storing,
sharing, and using knowledge is the key to any KMS. The use of a KMS often leads to additional
knowledge creation, storage, sharing, and usage. Many tools and techniques can be used to
create, store, and use knowledge. These tools and techniques are available from IBM, Microsoft,
and other companies and organizations.
Artificial intelligence systems form a broad and diverse set of systems that can replicate human
decision making for certain types of well-defined problems.
The term artificial intelligence is used to describe computers with the ability to mimic or
duplicate the functions of the human brain. The objective of building AI systems is not to replace
human decision making completely but to replicate it for certain types of well-defined problems.
Intelligent behavior encompasses several characteristics, including the abilities to learn from
experience and apply this knowledge to new experiences; handle complex situations and solve
problems for which pieces of information might be missing; determine relevant information in a
given situation, think in a logical and rational manner, and give a quick and correct response;
and understand visual images and process symbols. Computers are better than people at
transferring information, making a series of calculations rapidly and accurately, and making
complex calculations, but human beings are better than computers at all other attributes of
intelligence.
