10.Total de compromisos inscritos por los Sujetos Obligados
20 6 MANUAL DE INTEGRACIÓN Y FUNCIONAMIENTO DEL COMITÉ DE
Organizational or corporate memories record the accumulated knowledge about the services and the products of an organization, with the purpose of supporting the continuous enhancement of knowledge-intensive work practices and of alleviating the risk of “corporate amnesia” due to experts taking away their knowledge when they leave.
It is possible to build a corporate memory in a totally unstructured way: by maintaining all documents and recording all practices of an organization. This approach seems inexpensive; it involves, however, amassing a lot of irrelevant information that will need to be filtered later on. The opposite approach involves an intensive initial knowledge engineering effort leading to the construction of corporate knowledge bases and expert systems.
Buckingham Shum proposes a middle way, which can be particularly viable for organizations of knowledge workers: the recording of relevant team activities through the use of hyper textual representations linking the different steps of the activities, highlighting the different options considered at each step and associating actions and decisions with role and competencies of the people involved. Such hyper textual representations are created and negotiated ex vivo by knowledge workers, rather than reconstructed post mortem by knowledge engineers; they record process knowledge related to knowledge-intensive problem-solving and decision-making activities. The negotiation aspect is very relevant, because explicit knowledge comes often dressed with a deceitful appearance of “objectivity”
which in reality hides a specific point of view. Acknowledging the existence of this point of view and allowing for its negotiation is an important step towards getting organizations knowing themselves and making workers fully empowered. In this way, the negotiated point of view will effectively reflect the commitments of all involved stakeholders, and not just of single groups and individuals holding ``power’’ roles and positions in the organization.
We can also describe instead a full-fledged knowledge engineering approach suitable for building corporate memories from the product knowledge of large manufacturing organizations such as automotive industries. Starting from the collections of documents about the products of these organizations (product specifications, instruction manuals, trouble shooting guides etc.), they show how to extract the explicit knowledge that is in there and integrate it with further explicit knowledge obtained by externalizing the tacit knowledge related to the context of use of the documents. The knowledge thus acquired is represented in the form of conceptual graphs that relate the different parts of the products, associate parts with properties and connect single actions for operating the products into complex plans corresponding to full operating instructions. They show then how the initial investment needed for building this type of knowledge bases pays off in a number of ways: by providing capabilities for automatic multilingual document generation, by providing a knowledge space of existing product knowledge to support the fast design of new products, by providing a language-independent semantic representation of product knowledge that could be used to enforce enterprise coherence for companies operating in multilingual and multicultural environments.
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The software engineering requirements for supporting this type of corporate memories, needed for the strong integration of corporate memories with existing IT infrastructures, with particular regard to existing capabilities for database management, document management and business process support. A corporate memory architecture that meets these requirements is necessary and the paradigm shift of corporate memories from artificial intelligence to a more general framework for IT integration is the need of the hour.SUMMARY
Organizational culture describes the collective perceptions, beliefs and values of employees in the workplace. Culture penetrates to the essence of an organization. Individuals learn their organizational culture from the day one he or she joins the organization and these learned experiences help them to interpret the work environment so that they can conform and operate effectively in that setting.
Culture is important because it shapes assumptions about what knowledge is worth exchanging; it defines relationships between individual and organizational knowledge; it creates the context for social interaction that determines how knowledge will be shared in particular situations; and it shapes the processes by which new knowledge is created, legitimated, and distributed in organizations.
When building an effective knowledge culture, organizations need to have a range of strategies to ensure the values inherent in knowledge management are enacted (i.e. followed in practice) by each employee. Knowledge culture enablers are those influences that contribute to the creation of an effective and positive knowledge community.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are groups of people in organizations that form to share what they know, to learn from one another regarding some aspects of their work and to provide a social context for that work. Communities of practice structure an organization’s learning potential in two ways: through the knowledge they develop at their core and through interactions at their boundaries.
Organizational or corporate memories record the accumulated knowledge about the services and the products of an organization, with the purpose of supporting the continuous enhancement of knowledge-intensive work practices.
SHORT QUESTIONS
1. What do you mean by knowledge sharing culture?
2. Define organizational culture.
3. Define community of practice.
4. Write a note on organizational memory.
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LONG QUESTIONS
1. What is the culture of an organization? Why is it important to understand?
2. What are some of the key enablers and major obstacles to effective knowledge sharing that can be attributed to the overall organizational culture?
3. What are the various knowledge culture enablers? Explain.
4. How to cultivate knowledge culture in organizations?
5. Choose three organizational culture elements and consider how these might be different in a manufacturing community and knowledge community?
6. The chapter describes a number of knowledge culture features. Choose any four of these and outline how their absence might affect the knowledge community?
7. ‘Knowledge culture interventions should be centrally driven’. Discuss this statement.
8. Why do knowledge cultures need to be maintained? Whose responsibility is it?
9. How do you develop and nurture a CoP in an organization?