Assignment

(MT413)
Knowledge Management

Submitted by: Submitted to:

Ankita Bhatia Dr. Piyush Gupta
MBA/25007/19

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 Table of Contents

Contents Page no.

Introduction of Knowledge Management 3-8
Knowledge Acquisition and 9 - 14
Validation
Knowledge Representation 14 – 17
Inference Techniques 17 - 19

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MEANING
Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating, sharing, using and
managing the knowledge and information of an organization.[1] It refers to a
multidisciplinary approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the
best use of knowledge

INTRODUCTION
Going by the definition of Davenport and Prusak (1988) "Knowledge is a fluid mix
of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that
provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and
information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations,
it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in
organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms." Since the past few years,
organisations have always tried to manage the knowledge gained through various
experiences as best as it could. It is the changing business dynamics that mandated
the organisations to identify new processes, methods and strategies and
introduction of technology which provided new tools which enabled a paradigm
shift about knowledge management between individuals, teams, organizations. It
is realised that there are alternate and radical ways to accelerate learning and
knowledge processes.

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Benefits of knowledge management in an organization
Knowledge provides a competitive advantage to an employee as well as the
organization. The data and information which come with knowledge help
organization make an informed decision. For example, knowledge about
competitors pricing model or business strategy can help organization work towards
bettering the competitor. Historical data e.g sales data, pricing data, etc. can help
organization improve existing or proposed business initiative.
Knowledge management is a highly iterative process which consists of six major
tasks like create, capture, refine store, tag and circulate. The first step is to create or
capture data and store it at appropriate location. The second step is to refine the
data into meaningful information. The third step is to transmit information to
relevant stakeholders.
There are two types of knowledge, which need to be capture as part of knowledge
management. The first type is hard data in terms of numbers and figures. The
second type of knowledge is the interpretation of data captured based on
experience. The real need of the knowledge management system is to provide
access to the knowledge base whenever required.
Effective knowledge management reduces operational costs and improves
productivity because it provides seven key benefits:
 Spend less time recreating existing knowledge. When information is
easy to access and accurate, it reduces the need for coworkers to interrupt
each other with emails, chats, and support tickets. Employees and especially
support teams spend less time answering repetitive questions, freeing them
up to focus on more important—and more profitable—work.

 Get the information you need sooner (and with fewer headaches). If
you’ve ever sent an email asking for information only to have that email
forwarded multiple times to different people who might know the answer,
you know how unproductive it is when finding information feels like
playing a game of whack-a-mole.
 Make fewer mistakes. The old adage “history repeats itself” is as true in
business as it is in all other aspects of life. When employees aren’t sharing
information, they’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes others have already
made. But this is avoidable when the lessons-learned from mistakes and
failures are easily accessible to everyone.
 Make informed decisions. When employees share their experiences,
lessons-learned, and research on a searchable knowledge system, others can

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 access and review that information in order to consider multiple pieces of
data and differing viewpoints before making decisions.
 Standardize processes. If you’ve ever played the telephone game , you
know exactly how distorted information gets when communicated by word-
of-mouth and in silos. With documented and shared processes, it’s easy to
make sure that everyone is on the same page and following approved
procedures.
 Provide better service to employees and customers. Effective
knowledge management allows support teams to resolve employee and
customer requests quickly and correctly. Employees are able to stay happy
and productive, and customers place more trust in the company, which
makes them more likely to purchase.

Components of Knowledge Management?

The best four components of knowledge management are people, process,
content/IT, and strategy. Regardless of the industry, size, or knowledge needs of
your organization, you always need people to lead, sponsor, and support
knowledge sharing. You need defined processes to manage and measure
knowledge flows. You need knowledge content and IT tools that connect the right
people to the right content at the right time. And finally, you need a clear and
documented strategy for using KM to meet the most important and urgent needs of
the business. 
Through over two decades of research on KM, APQC has found that these are the
key ingredients to build and grow a sustainable KM program. Let’s dig a little
deeper into each component.
 People
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “people, process, and technology.” Since
at least the early 1990s, organizational leaders have used this paradigm—
often referred to as also the “golden triangle”—to guide initiatives and lead
organizational change. The idea is, if you over-focus on one factor, your
initiative is bound to fail. And the order is important: you need to get the
right people involved before you get into processes and technology. When
you’re starting a KM program, you need two kinds of people: 
senior leaders to provide sponsorship and insight into broader organizational
strategy, and
cross-functional stakeholders to guide implementation.
Senior sponsors should be visible, engaged business leaders who have something
big to gain from the implementation of KM. Often, they’re people who lead
business areas with major, urgent knowledge needs (e.g., experts are retiring, new

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hires can’t get up to speed quickly). In selecting cross-functional stakeholders, look
first to your colleagues in HR, IT, and process improvement—APQC
research shows collaborating with these functions improves effectiveness. 
As the KM effort matures, most organizations staff up a KM core team, identify
KM champions and facilitators across the business, and establish an executive
steering committee to provide ongoing stewardship. If you think this sounds like a
lot of people, you’re right! You need engaged people at different levels and in
different areas of the business to really build knowledge sharing into the culture.
But that doesn’t mean you have to spend a ton of money or take away too much
time from folks—especially if your processes are smart, your content and IT
infrastructure isn’t cumbersome, and your strategy is compelling.  
 Process
In organizations with strong KM processes, knowledge flows like a city
water supply: when someone needs it, they just turn the tap. The KM team,
like a city planner, knows how everything flows beneath the surface. They
can identify bottlenecks, reroute flows, and measure inputs and outputs. But
the end user doesn’t need to understand how all that stuff works. For them,
getting the knowledge they need is simple and easy.
APQC has identified a standard knowledge flow process that describes how
knowledge flows through organizations. It’s a seven-step cycle:
Create new knowledge (this happens every day, all the time, across all areas of the
business)
Identify knowledge that is critical to strategy and operations
Collect knowledge so it can be shared with others
Review knowledge to evaluate its relevancy, accuracy, and applicability
Share knowledge through documentation, informal posts, and collaborative
activities
Access knowledge through pull (e.g., search) and push (e.g., alerts) mechanisms
Use knowledge to solve problems faster and make more informed decisions. 
For KM teams, the key is to identify ways to build these steps into the business
processes people already use every day. For example, you can build knowledge
collection into stage gates, or integrate knowledge review into certain job roles.
Technology tools can also help with this—by, for example, delivering relevant
alerts in the flow of work—but ultimately, you need to understand people’s
processes first. 
. 
 Content/IT
Content is any kind of documented knowledge, from vetted best practices to
quick-and-dirty tips shared amongst colleagues. Content can be immediately
reusable stuff like templates and how-to videos, or it may be messy and
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 unstructured information (e.g., project documentation). We put content
alongside IT because IT infrastructures enable people to create this stuff, put
it somewhere, and access and reuse it. If you don’t have KM, people will
still create and use content—but they’ll put it in places others can’t find, re-
make things others have already created, and (most dangerously) reuse
content that’s out of date or incorrect.
Effective KM programs have workflows for creating and vetting content,
taxonomies to organize content, and technology tools to connect people to content.
Advanced organizations use content management to facilitate collaboration,
uncover innovations, and automatically serve up content to employees in their
most teachable moments. 
 Strategy
Every KM program needs a clear, documented, and business-relevant
strategy. You can have the best technology tools and a super-smart KM
team, but it will be all for naught without strategy. Perhaps Kenichi Ohmae
said it best, “Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong
direction.” 
You need a solid business case that demonstrates a deep understanding of
your organization’s critical knowledge needs. The business case should
outline:
the value proposition for KM (that is, how KM will solve business challenges);
the tools, approaches, and roles you’ll need to get there; 
a budget; andthe expected impact of KM (ROI).

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Knowledge Management Technologies:
Knowledge management (KM) technology can be categorized as:
 Groupware—Software that facilitates collaboration and sharing of
organisational information. Such applications provide tools for threaded
discussions, document sharing, organisation-wide uniform email, and other
collaboration-related features.
 Workflow systems—Systems that allow the representation of processes
associated with the creation, use and maintenance of organisational
knowledge, such as the process to create and utilise forms and documents.
 Content management and document management systems—Software
systems that automate the process of creating web content and/or documents.
Roles such as editors, graphic designers, writers and producers can be
explicitly modeled along with the tasks in the process and validation criteria.
Commercial vendors started either to support documents or to support web
content but as the Internet grew these functions merged and vendors now
perform both functions.
 Enterprise portals—Software that aggregates information across the entire
organisation or for groups such as project teams.
 eLearning—Software that enables organisations to create customised
training and education. This can include lesson plans, monitoring progress
and online classes.
 Planning and scheduling software—Software that automates schedule
creation and maintenance. The planning aspect can integrate with project
management software.
 Telepresence—Software that enables individuals to have virtual "face-to-
face" meetings without assembling at one location. Videoconferencing is the
most obvious example.
 Semantic technology such as ontologies—Systems that encode meaning
alongside data to give machines the ability to extract and infer information.

KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND VALIDATION

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Knowledge Acquisition
Knowledge acquisition is the process used to define the rules and ontologies
required for a knowledge-based system. The phrase was first used in conjunction
with expert systems to describe the initial tasks associated with developing an
expert system, namely finding and interviewing domain experts and capturing their
knowledge via rules, objects, and frame-based ontologies.
Knowledge acquisition refers to the process of extracting, structuring, and
organizing domain knowledge from domain experts into a program

 A knowledge engineer is an expert in AI language and knowledge representation

who investigates a particular problem domain, determines important concepts, and
creates correct and efficient representations of the objects and relations in the
domain.
Capturing domain knowledge of a problem domain is the first step in building an
expert system. In general, the knowledge acquisition process through a knowledge
engineer can be divided into four phases:
1.Planning: The goal is to understand the problem domain, identify domain
experts, analyze various knowledge acquisition techniques, and design proper
procedures.
2.Knowledge extraction: The goal is to extract knowledge from experts by
applying various knowledge acquisition techniques.
3.Knowledge analysis: The outputs from the knowledge extraction phase, such as
concepts and heuristics, are analyzed and represented in formal forms, including
heuristic rules, frames, objects and relations, semantic networks, classification
schemes, neural networks, and fuzzy logic sets. These representations are used in
implementing a prototype expert system.
4.Knowledge verification: The prototype expert system containing the formal
representation of the heuristics and concepts is verified by the experts. If the
knowledge base is incomplete or insufficient to solve the problem, alternative
knowledge acquisition techniques may be applied, and additional knowledge
acquisition process may be conducted.

SOURCES
The main sources are of knowledge acquisition are:
Customers:

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  Customer knowledge comes in different forms. Gerbert et al (2002) identify
three different types:
 Knowledge for customer: The knowledge that the customers can gain in
order to satisfy their knowledge needs.. It can include product, market, and
supplier knowledge. It can be sourced from our company or from other
external sources like other customers and competitors (Zanjani 2008).
 Knowledge about customer: The kind of knowledge that enables us to know
the customer better, to understand their motivations, and to address them
better. Includes requirements, expectations, and purchasing activities.
 Knowledge from customer: The kind of knowledge that deals with products,
suppliers, and markets. It can be used to improve our products and services.

Some possible KM initiatives thus include:

 Collecting feedback
 Collecting and processing marketing related information
 Collecting suggestions

Suppliers:
Chan (2009) presents a classification for supplier knowledge based on the concepts
outlined by Gerbert et al (2002) regarding customer knowledge. These are:
 Knowledge for suppliers: This is the knowledge that suppliers require and
includes "production needs and forecasts, inventory, products, customers,
and markets" (Chan 2009).
 Knowledge about suppliers: This is knowledge that is used to understand
how the supplier can match the requirements of the organization; provide
insight regarding quality, delivery, defects, financial risks etc.
 Knowledge from suppliers: This refers to the knowledge that suppliers have
gathered from their dealings with the organization.

Competitors:
This deserves mention but it is a fairly straightforward aspect of KM. It simply
involves collecting, organizing and presenting the data, information, and
knowledge that the firm has acquired in such a way that one can search, retrieve,
and analyze it. Some of this falls within the scope of information management, but
it is particularly the process of using these components to create better decisions
and new knowledge that is of interest here.
IT systems are very useful in this case, since the sources are largely explicit and
presumably require frequent updating and manipulation. Data mining and

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analysis, document management systems with suitable search functions, and expert
systems are most relevant here.

Partners/Alliances:
Alliances intended to increase knowledge are a valuable potential resource.
However these must be properly managed. Key success factors include fostering
trust, learning from your partner, and effectively managing the creation of
knowledge relevant to both parties. Knowledge transfer can be facilitated by
personnel exchanges, common projects and other forms of regular interaction,
technology sharing, etc. (Gamble & Blackwell 2001). Focusing on informal
communication, collaboration, and socialization is of paramount importance for
valuable tacit knowledge acquisition and for extending communities of practice
beyond the firm's borders.
Chan (2009) once again formulates a set of knowledge types based around the
work of Gerbert et al (2002):
Knowledge for partners: Knowledge which satisfies their needs, including
"knowledge about products, markets, and suppliers" (Chan 2009).
Knowledge about partners: Knowledge acquisition focused on understanding the
ability of partners to perform their role in the relationship. Includes distribution
channels, products, services, etc.
Knowledge from partners: The knowledge that partners have accumulated from
dealing with the organization.
Other expertise:
This refers to the other sources of external knowledge available to a firm, and
includes hiring new personel or acquiring the services of consultants.
The role of KM in these cases is to make sure that the right knowledge is acquired.
Essentially the process has two parts, on the one hand the strategic and tactical
requirements of the firm must be taken into account, and on the other these must be
compared to the knowledge assets of the organization.
If external services are acquired from consultants or other temporary service
providers, KM must work together with strategic management to determine if this
knowledge is worth integrating into the firm by assessing the need to reuse it in the
future vs the cost of transferring it into the organization. If it is deemed as
something that should be integrated, then the right learning situations must be
established to transfer the knowledge into the firm. These could
be mentoring relationships, use of project teams that include organizational
members, courses and education, etc.

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Knowledge Validation:

Validation is a critical process in the whole knowledge-based system life cycle. A

knowledge base incorporated into such systems has to be verified or (more
generally) validated. There have been many approaches to develop specialised
procedures and techniques, aimed at assuring the highest level of knowledge
quality. Keeping in mind "knowledge validation mappings", we believe a more
global view is necessary to facilitate applying the proper techniques, so the paper
deals with practical guidelines of knowledge validation (KV). Facing the most
popular techniques of KV: decision tables- based, decision trees-based or nets-
based with the criteria set to be utilised, we try to define certain principles useful in
the validation procedures referring to two levels: general and detailed. The first one

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refers to paradigms, which arise from interrelationships among the crucial
components of the KV process (procedures, approaches and criteria). The detailed
principles are addressed to specific forms used for knowledge representations:
rules, frames, neural nets and others.

KNOWLEDGE VALIDATION APPROACHES

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Validation by an individual, where a single person has validation sign-off. You see
this in organisatuions where people with technical authority sign off on standard
procedures.
Validation by a group of individuals. Think of the aviation industry, where new
knowledge gained through indicent investigation is used to update pilot chekclists,
but only after sign-off by the manufacturer anthe aviation authorities.
Validation by a community of practice. Here a community of
practice collaboratively agrees (perhaps through the use of online discussion and/or
a wiki) on the validity of knowledge. 
Validation through experience and use.  Again you might expect a wiki to be self-
correcting, as the knowledge is validated through use. However you need to make
sure that the knowledge is based on evicence, not opinion, preference, prejudice or
hearsay. We hear a lot about "evidence based policy" in Governament, or
"evidence based healthcare" in the medical world, and often an individual or group
is accountable for reviewing the evidence

Knowledge Representation:
Knowledge representation is the study of how the beliefs, intentions, and value
judgments of an intelligent agent can be expressed in a transparent, symbolic
notation suitable for automated reasoning. From a purely computational point of
view, the major objectives to be achieved are breadth of scope, expressivity,
precision, support of efficient inference, learnability, robustness, and ease of
construction.
A knowledge representation (KR) is most fundamentally a surrogate, a substitute
for the thing itself, used to enable an entity to determine consequences by thinking
rather than acting, i.e., by reasoning about the world rather than taking action in it.
 It is a set of ontological commitments, i.e., an answer to the question: In
what terms should I think about the world?
 It is a fragmentary theory of intelligent reasoning, expressed in terms of
three components: (i) the representation's fundamental conception of
intelligent reasoning; (ii) the set of inferences the representation sanctions;
and (iii) the set of inferences it recommends.
 It is a medium for pragmatically efficient computation, i.e., the
computational environment in which thinking is accomplished. One
contribution to this pragmatic efficiency is supplied by the guidance a

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 representation provides for organizing information so as to facilitate making
the recommended inferences.
 It is a medium of human expression, i.e., a language in which we say things
about the world.

What to be Represented?
Following are the kind of knowledge which needs to be represented in AI systems:

o Meta-knowledge: It is knowledge about what we know

o Events: Events are the actions which occur in our world.
o Performance: It describe behavior which involves knowledge about how to
do things.
o Object: All the facts about objects in our world domain. E.g., Guitars
contains strings, trumpets are brass instruments.
o Facts: Facts are the truths about the real world and what we represent.

Requirements for knowledge Representation system:

A good knowledge representation system must possess the following properties.
1. Representational Accuracy:
KR system should have the ability to represent all kind of required knowledge.
2. Inferential Adequacy:
KR system should have ability to manipulate the representational structures to
produce new knowledge corresponding to existing structure.
3. Inferential Efficiency:
The ability to direct the inferential knowledge mechanism into the most productive
directions by storing appropriate guides.
4. Acquisitional efficiency- The ability to acquire the new knowledge easily using
automatic methods.

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Characteristics Of Knowledge Representation:
 Non-monotonic reasoning. Non-monotonic reasoning allows various kinds
of hypothetical reasoning. The system associates facts asserted with the rules
and facts used to justify them and as those facts change updates the
dependent knowledge as well. In rule based systems this capability is known
as a truth maintenance system.

 Reasoning efficiency. This refers to the run time efficiency of the system.
The ability of the knowledge base to be updated and the reasoner to develop
new inferences in a reasonable period of time. In some ways, this is the flip
side of expressive adequacy. In general, the more powerful a representation,
the more it has expressive adequacy, the less efficient its automated
reasoning engine will be. Efficiency was often an issue, especially for early
applications of knowledge representation technology. They were usually
implemented in interpreted environments such as Lisp, which were slow
compared to more traditional platforms of the time.

 Incompleteness. Traditional logic requires additional axioms and constraints

to deal with the real world as opposed to the world of mathematics. Also, it
is often useful to associate degrees of confidence with a statement. I.e., not
simply say "Socrates is Human" but rather "Socrates is Human with
confidence 50%". This was one of the early innovations from expert
systems research which migrated to some commercial tools, the ability to
associate certainty factors with rules and conclusions. Later research in this
area is known as fuzzy logic.

 Expressive adequacy. The standard that Brachman and most AI researchers

use to measure expressive adequacy is usually First Order Logic (FOL).
Theoretical limitations mean that a full implementation of FOL is not
practical. Researchers should be clear about how expressive (how much of
full FOL expressive power) they intend their representation to be.

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  Meta-representation. This is also known as the issue of reflection in
computer science. It refers to the capability of a formalism to have access to
information about its own state. An example would be the meta-object
protocol in Smalltalk and CLOS that gives developers run time access to the
class objects and enables them to dynamically redefine the structure of the
knowledge base even at run time. Meta-representation means the knowledge
representation language is itself expressed in that language. For example, in
most Frame based environments all frames would be instances of a frame
class. That class object can be inspected at run time, so that the object can
understand and even change its internal structure or the structure of other
parts of the model. In rule-based environments, the rules were also usually
instances of rule classes. Part of the meta protocol for rules were the meta
rules that prioritized rule firing.

Inference Techniques of Knowledge Management:

Inference

Inference is what makes a logic more than a notation. Inference rules determine
how one pattern can be generated from another. Thus, new pieces of knowledge
can be added based on previous ones. The final objective is to capture how agents
in general reason about what they know.

There exist different kinds of reasoning and this leads to different inference types:
deduction, abduction and induction.

Deduction
It is also known as logical inference because deduction is the type of reasoning that
logics try to capture. The more important characteristic of deduction is that it
preserves truth as determined by semantics. From true premises, it guarantees a
true conclusion.

Full deduction, though complete, is computationally an expensive process.

Therefore, when it is implemented, some tricks are applied to make this process
practical. Two general approaches are forward-chaining and backward-chaining.
They consider only subsets of logic deduction.

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  Forward-chaining: it is centred on the Modus ponens rule of inference, p ∧
p→q ├ q. Forward-chaining is applied at assertion time, i.e. when new
knowledge is introduced into a knowledge base. A knowledge base is the
part of a knowledge system where knowledge is stored. Therefore, it is
associated to insertions and modifications.
One example of forward-chaining implementation is SQL triggers. Another
one is inheritance that propagates characteristics from broader to narrower
concepts.
 Backward-chaining: it considers the Modus tollens rule of inference, ¬q ∧
p→q ├ ¬p. Backward-chaining is used at query time, i.e. when answering
questions posed to a knowledge system, which answers them from what
there is in the knowledge base.
For instance, backward-chaining is used to solve SQL queries and in the
Prolog programming language. Another example is resolution. It is a
complete and sound form of backward-chaining deduction. Usually,
forward-chaining implementations apply so many restrictions that they
sacrifice completeness in order to improve efficiency.

Abduction
This inference type is not a legal inference because it allows false conclusions.
Abduction is an explanation generation process. Some chunks of knowledge are
selected, evaluated against the problem at hand and finally packaged into a theory.

Abduction may be performed at various levels of complexity:

1. Reuse: associatively search a predefined theory and reuse it for the current
problem.
2. Revise: find a theory that approximately matches the problem at hand and
apply revision techniques to tailor it for the current situation.
3. Combine: search fragments of knowledge and repeatedly perform revision
steps to combine them into a complete theory.

Induction
 It is the inference process involved in learning, which tries to anticipate
how things will act. From series of facts, a generalisation is concluded.
Induction is not a valid inference because it does not guarantee truth.

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 Thus, it needs retraction upon contradiction, i.e. when an instance that
contradicts the generalisation is found.
 It can be expressed as: from P(a), P(b),… conclude (∀x)P(x).

Analogy
 Another kind of inference can be considered, analogy. It is a combination
of second-order induction plus deduction. However, it does not preserve
truth, and, indeed, not even falsify. Yet, analogy is very useful for
argumentation, scientific discovery, case-based reasoning or planning.
 Analogy can be summarised as: from P(a)→P(b) ∧ R(a)→R(b) perhaps
Q(a)→Q(b).

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