knowldgWORKS NEWS Special Issue Number 35 October 7, 2000

Food for Thought – What is Your Relationship With Knowledge?

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Announcements

This special issue of knowldgWORKS News includes two important announcements that may be of interest to you.

From Michele Eichorn … Regarding the Organizing for eBusiness Success Meeting

Randy,

We will be participating in a one-day conference, "Organizing for eBusiness Success", on Friday, October 20th, in Philadelphia, PA USA.  The conference is a presentation of my company, Visalign, LLC, and the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Organizational Dynamics.  I'm excited about this opportunity to explore what I think are some unique and practical ideas for succeeding in eBusiness. To my knowledge, this is the first conference of it's kind, focusing on the organizational dynamics of eBusiness, which is where in my experience the lion's share of leverage lies.  The last session of the event will deal with Knowledge Management and it's impact on eBusiness success.  I've included a copy of the brochure for your perusal.

Penn's faculty will share concepts and ways of thinking that participants will find immediately applicable to their organizations.  Also, Visalign's consultants share practical ideas from their work in the field (as for our work in the field, if you haven't heard, one of our eBusiness solutions just won us the Worldwide Microsoft Business Solution of the Year for 2000.  You can hear more about this solution at

http://www.visalign.com/aboutvisalign/news/fr-news0.html).

To ensure that the day is not just a day full of ideas, but one that facilitates taking action, participants will receive a handbook that not only includes all the materials covered during the day, but reference materials for each topic, along with action planning worksheets. Last but not least, the day will conclude with a post-conference networking reception in the beautiful Chinese Rotunda at the University Museum.

Thank you for your consideration,

Michele M. Eichhorn

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        ************************************************

        *                  Second                      *

        *              CALL FOR PAPERS                 *

        *                                              *

        *     The First Asia-Pacific Conference on     *

        *         Web Intelligence (WI-2001)           *

        *         ==========================           *

        *                                              *

        *     Maebashi TERRSA, Maebashi City, Japan    *

        *             October 23-26, 2001              *

        ************************************************

          Home Page: http://kis.maebashi-it.ac.jp/wi01

           Paper Submission Deadline: March 20, 2001

           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

              WI-2001 will be jointly held with

             The Second Asia-Pacific Conference on

             Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT-2001)

             =======================================

          WI-2001 and IAT-2001 Joint Keynote Speakers:

   Edward A. Feigenbaum (Turing Award Winner), Stanford University

   Benjamin Wah (2001 IEEE Computer Society President), University of Illinois

                    WI-2001 Invited Speakers:

       W. Lewis Johson (University of Southern California, USA)

       Riichiro Mizoguchi (Osaka University, Japan)

       Patrick S. P. Wang (Northeastern University, USA)

The 21st century is the age of Internet and World Wide Web. The Web revolutionizes the way we gather, process, and use information. At the same time, it also redefines the meanings and processes of business, commerce, marketing, finance, publishing, education, research, development, as well as other aspects of our daily life.  Although individual Web-based information systems are constantly being deployed, advanced issues and techniques for developing and for benefiting from Web intelligence still remain to be systematically studied.

Broadly speaking, Web Intelligence (WI) exploits AI and advanced information technology on the Web and Internet.  It is the key and the most urgent research field of IT for business intelligence. The Asia-Pacific Conference on Web Intelligence (WI) is an international forum for researchers and practitioners

1. (1) to present the state-of-the-art in the development of Web intelligence;
2. (2) to examine performance characteristics of various approaches in Web-based intelligent information technology;
3. (3) to cross-fertilize ideas on the development of Web-based intelligent information systems among different domain

* Web-Based Applications:

•   - Business Intelligence
•   - Computational Societies and Markets
•   - Conversational Systems
•   - Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
•   - Direct Marketing
•   - Electronic Commerce and Electronic Business
•   - Electronic Library
•   - Information Markets
•   - Price Dynamics and Pricing Algorithms
•   - Measuring and Analyzing Web Merchandising
•   - Web-Based Decision Support Systems
•   - Web-Based Distributed Information Systems
•   - Web-Based EDI

        Email: yiming@watson.ibm.com

by July 2, 2001

Authors of accepted WI-2001 papers will be invited to demonstrate their systems at the conference.

It is understood that once a submission is selected for demonstration at the conference, the presenter(s) of the demo will be responsible for bringing necessary software/hardware equipment.

IMPORTANT DATES

===============

•      March 20, 2001   Paper submission deadline
•        May 20, 2001   Notification of paper acceptance mailed
•       June 20, 2001   Camera-ready copies of accepted papers due
•        July 2, 2001   Demo submission deadline
•      August 3, 2001   Notification of demo acceptance mailed
• October 23-26, 2001   Conference technical sessions

E-mail: zhong@maebashi-it.ac.jp

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knowldgWORKS News Special Issue Number 35 October 7, 2000

Food for Thought – What is Your Relationship With Knowledge?

 Have you ever considered how you feel about your knowledge? I know this sounds like a very strange question, but in keeping with my own considerations about knowledge management and the idea of personal knowledge management this seems like a very relevant question. After all, our ability to record and transfer information is one of the fundamental characteristics that distinguishes us from most other forms of life on this planet.

 What do I mean when I say, "how do you feel about your knowledge?" Actually, I mean it in a very literal sense. Do you feel good about your knowledge? And if you do feel good about your knowledge, what exactly does that mean? Is there a relationship between feeling good about your knowledge and the value of the knowledge? Of course when I speak of value I am speaking of this in personal terms that may or may not mean that the knowledge has economic value – in fact it is probably the case that most of the knowledge that you "know" is in the form of potential knowledge waiting to be used. Have you consciously described what your feelings about your knowledge are? It might be an interesting exercise to take out a piece of paper and do an inventory of your feelings about your knowledge.

 How about your relationship with knowledge? Is your relationship with your knowledge a good one? Are you comfortable living with the knowledge you have or do you find that the knowledge you have irritates you? What precisely is your relationship with your knowledge? Does the relationship take the form of a friend? Can you visit the knowledge for support when you need it? Or do you find that your relationship with knowledge is more of one based on appetite and hunger rather than one based on friendship? Do you find sometimes your appetite is insatiable and other times you are satiated. How would you describe your relationship with your knowledge?

 In describing your relationship with knowledge, what are the characteristics of the knowledge that you like? And in thinking about what these characteristics are, what does it mean for you to like knowledge? Does it mean that you find knowledge useful? Does it mean that you enjoy knowledge for knowledge sake regardless of whether it is useful or not? What are the characteristics of this knowledge? Do you like knowledge that comes to you in very long lists of facts and each of these facts can be traced back to its source. Or do you prefer sweeping overviews, general pictures that give you a sense of the knowledge? Do you like to receive knowledge visually? Or do you like knowledge when it comes to you aurally? Do you find the only way you receive knowledge is when you actually do something with it. Or do you like to read it? Can you get your knowledge when you are in a group or is it your preference to receive the knowledge individually, preferably by yourself or from just one other person?

 And how do your own feelings about knowledge change when they need to extend to knowledge outside of your own sphere? Do you have the same feelings about knowledge outside of yourself? Is the relationship the same? Or do you find that you need to understand the knowledge before you can have a relationship with it? Do you first have to analyze the external knowledge in terms of your internal knowledge before you can enter into a relationship with it? And what about the sources of knowledge? How does that affect your relationship with any external knowledge? Does the source have any affect on the state of your relationship with knowledge? Does the source make you resistant to the knowledge? Or does the source make it easy for you to enter into a relationship with it?

If we understood what our relationship with knowledge is, wouldn't it be easier to learn? Wouldn't it be easier to participate in groups? Wouldn't it be easier to fashion your own knowledge in such a way to make it acceptable to others?

 We often speak of knowledge management as a collaborative activity, but what is collaboration? We can call it working together, but what is happening during this process? Most likely we will be sharing some knowledge. It may be that we are sharing knowledge for the purpose of solving a problem (knowledge that we know) or we may be using knowledge to engage in the collaboration. Going back to my definition of knowledge, "that which enables us to do things," it makes some sense to consider our relationship with knowledge because it is that which will fashion how we collaborate when we put that knowledge into the collaborative space.

 What if I put out some knowledge that smells? What would smelly knowledge be like? You can imagine someone saying something that would make you want to hold your nose, can you not? Well what if I am in a collaborative setting and I am putting out smelly knowledge. This would not be very conducive to collaboration. The same can be said if I put smelly knowledge in a knowledge base – people won't want to use the knowledge base because the knowledge is smelly to them.

 Our relationship with our knowledge is key to this idea of knowledge management – both personally and organizationally, so don't discount what relationship you have with your knowledge and the relationships others might have with theirs.

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The knowledgWORKS News and knowldgWORKS News Shorts are written in its entirety by Randy Kaplan and edited by Harriet Trenholm. Suggestions for the newsletter should be sent to infoac@accsys-corp.com. All suggestions will be considered and always appreciated.

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Published by Dr. Randy M. Kaplan, and ACCSYS Corporation.

This newsletter is the property of ACCSYS Corporation. No part may be reproduced in any form or media without permission from ACCSYS Corporation. Copyright (c) 1999-2000 ACCSYS Corporation. All rights reserved.