Course: 707.009 Foundations of Knowledge Management

(707.009 Grundlagen des Wissensmanagements)

Graz University of Technology Fall 2007/08

Classes: Thursdays 13:15-14:45, October 2007 - January 2008, Room HS Modul (Inffeldgasse 21a, Ground Floor)

https://online.tu-graz.ac.at/tug_online/lv.detail?clvnr=122351
Markus Strohmaier, Klaus Tochtermann

 

Instructor: Markus Strohmaier
Adress: Inffeldgasse 21a, 2nd floor, Room IMO2152, 8010 Graz, Austria
e-mail: markus.strohmaier at@ tugraz.at (remove spaces, replace at@ with @), start subject line with [707.009]

Students with special needs: If you need accomodation for any type of physical or learning disability, please contact me via e-mail to set up a meeting where we can discuss potential modifications for your participation.

Announcements:

About the course:

This course aims to give students a basic understanding about the fundamental principles, concepts and challenges underlying knowledge management (KM). At the end of this course, students will have a thorough theoretical understanding of these issues, and the ability to relate and apply KM theories in the light of simple examples. Selected case studies are used to illustrate the utility of knowledge management theories in specific situations, but also to highlight current gaps between KM theory and practice.

Grading:

Students need to take a final exam, which will take place at the end of the semester. For more information on taking the exam, please read the according policy at the end of this page.

Preliminary course schedule and weekly readings:

Note to students: Changes to this schedule will likely be made. Additional/other readings may be assigned. Access credentials for protected resources will be handed out in class. Please notify me if any links are broken or outdated.

Note to instructors: All teaching materials on this website are available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Austria License, except where noted otherwise. Access to protected areas is only available to enrolled students.

 

Week
Date
Title, Slides Comments and Links
Week 1
4.10.2007

Overview and Motivation

(slides)

In this class, we will discuss the course organization and give a basic motivation for and introduction to the course.

Readings: P.F. Drucker, Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge, California Management Review 41 79--94 (1999) [Protected Access]

Week 2
11.10.2007

Knowledge Types and Processes

(slides)

What is knowledge? What forms of knowledge can we identify? We will discuss some basic distinctions and characterizations.

Readings: D. Kirsh, When is information explicitly represented?, Information, Language and Cognition - The Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science.: 340--365, 1990. [Protected Access]

Week 3
18.10.2007

Knowledge Management Perspectives

(slides)

A series of different roles and perspectives on knowledge management have been proposed by KM researchers in the past: We will discuss selected perspectives and some implications for knowledge management.

Readings: M.T. Hansen and N. Nohria and T. Tierney, What's your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?, Harvard Business Review, 1999. [Protected Access]
M. Earl, Knowledge Management Strategies: Toward a Taxonomy, Journal of Management Information Systems 18 215--233, 2001. [Protected Access]

Week 4
25.10.2007

Knowledge Organization

(slides)

How can knowledge be organized? We will discuss some basic principles of knowledge organization, such as categorization, taxonomies and concept systems.

Readings: C.B. Mervis and E. Rosch, Categorization of Natural Objects, Annual Review of Psychology 32 89--115, 1981 [Protected Access]

Week 5
8.11.2007

Broad Knowledge Bases

(slides)

What kinds of broad knowledge bases exist? We will discuss different forms of knowledge bases and representations, such as metadata, wordnet, framenet, cyc, openmind and others.

Readings: T. Berners-Lee and J. Hendler and O. Lassila, The semantic Web, Scientific American, 284 (5) 2001.

Week 6
15.11.2007

Knowledge Acquisition

(slides)

How can knowledge be acquired in a way that is amenable to computation and/or analysis?

Readings: L. von Ahn, Games with a Purpose, Computer, 39(6): 92--94, 2006.

Week 7
22.11.2007

Knowledge Transfer

(slides)

How can knowledge transfer be characterized and what factors can influence knowledge transfer? We will discuss these and further issues.

Readings: M. E. Nissen and R. E. Levitt, Agent-Based Modeling of Knowledge Flows: Illustration from the Domain of Information Systems Design, Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004.
A. Cabrera and E.F. Cabrera, Knowledge-sharing dilemmas, Organization Studies 23 687-710 (2002)

Week 8
29.11.2007

Organizational Knowledge Repositories

(slides)

How can knowledge repositories be designed and deployed? We will discuss concepts such as knowledge reuse, discretionary databases, experience factories and selected concepts from case based reasoning.

Readings: V. R. Basili and G. Caldiera and D.H. Rombach, Experience Factory, Encyclopedia of Software Engineering 469-476 (1994)

Week 9
6.12.2007

Psychology and Knowledge Management

(slides)

In this class, we will discuss some fundamental psychological concepts in the context of knowledge management, including for example Knowledge Space Theory.

Guest Lecture: T. Ley, Know-Center

Week 10
13.12.2007

Multimedia & Semantic Metadata

(slides)

In this class, we will discuss different forms of semantic annotation of multimedia documents.

Guest Lecture: M. Lux, Klagenfurt University

Week 11
10.1.2008

Business Process Oriented Knowledge Management I

(combined slides)

In this class, we will discuss different approaches aimed at integrating knowledge management into an organization's business processes.

Readings: U. Remus and F. Lehner. The Role of Process-oriented Enterprise Modeling in Designing Process-oriented Knowledge Management Systems. Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium on Bringing Knowledge to Business Processes. Stanford, CA, USA, 2000.


10.1.2008
see announcements

Business Process Oriented Knowledge Management II

 

Continuation of Business Process Oriented Knowledge Management I.

 

Week 12

no class

 

held in week 11

Week 13
24.1.2008

Knowledge-based Analysis

(slides)

 

How can socio-technological systems be organized from a knowledge perspective? We will discuss an agent-oriented modeling approach for analyzing knowledge transfer instruments.

Readings: M. Strohmaier, E. Yu, J. Horkoff, J. Aranda and S. Easterbrook, Analyzing Knowledge Transfer Effectiveness – An Agent-Oriented Approach, In Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-40 2007), January 3-9, IEEE Computer Society, Hawaii, USA, 2007.

 

Week 14
31.1.2008

Final Exam

No aids are allowed at the final exam.

Further selected course material available online:

Selected Books and Articles:

Policy for Exams

Please see the current policy here.