Management Information System

Ch-11 Managing Knowledge

(Use of Intelligent
Information Systems in an
Organization )

S.Mookherjee

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 What Is the Role of Knowledge
Management Systems in Business?
• Knowledge management systems among fastest
growing areas of software investment
• Information economy
– 37 percent U.S. labor force: knowledge and information workers
– 55 percent U.S. GDP from knowledge and information sectors
• Substantial part of a firm’s stock market value is related
to intangible assets: knowledge, brands, reputations, and
unique business processes
• Well-executed knowledge-based projects can produce
extraordinary ROI

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 Important Dimensions of Knowledge

• Data, knowledge, and wisdom

• Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge
• Important dimensions of knowledge
– Knowledge is a firm asset.
– Knowledge has different forms.
– Knowledge has a location.
– Knowledge is situational.

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 The Knowledge Management Value Chain

• Knowledge management
– Set of business processes developed in an organization to
create, store, transfer, and apply knowledge
• Knowledge management value chain
– Each stage adds value to raw data and information as they
are transformed into usable knowledge
• Knowledge acquisition
• Knowledge storage
• Knowledge dissemination
• Knowledge application

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The Knowledge Management Value Chain..

• Knowledge acquisition
– Documenting tacit and explicit knowledge
• Storing documents, reports, presentations, best
practices
• Unstructured documents (e.g., e-mails)
• Developing online expert networks
– Creating knowledge
– Tracking data from TPS ( ERP ) and external sources
• Knowledge storage
– Databases
– Document / Learning management systems

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Class Discussion – What knowledge elements need to be stored in a Hospital ?
The Knowledge Management Value Chain..
• Knowledge dissemination
– Portals, wikis
– E-mail, instant messaging
– Search engines, collaboration tools
– A deluge of information?
• Training programs, informal networks, and shared
management experience help managers focus
attention on important information.
• Knowledge application
– New business practices
– New products and services
– New markets
– New Projects
– Sales Proposals 6
Figure 11.1: The Knowledge Management
Value Chain
Types of Knowledge Management Systems

• Enterprise-wide knowledge management systems

– General-purpose firm-wide efforts to collect, store,
distribute, and apply digital content and knowledge
• Knowledge work systems (KWS)
– Specialized systems built for engineers, scientists, other
knowledge workers charged with discovering and creating
new knowledge ( e.g CAD )
• Intelligent techniques ( Analytics )
– Diverse group of techniques such as data mining used for
various goals: discovering knowledge, distilling knowledge,
discovering optimal solutions

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 What Types of Systems Are Used for
Enterprise-Wide Knowledge Management?

• Three major types of knowledge in an enterprise

– Structured documents
• Reports, Charts , Spread sheets
• Formal rules
– Semistructured documents
• E-mails, videos , Presentations ,
– Unstructured, tacit knowledge ( e.g. competitor info ,
customer info )
• 80% of an organization’s business content is semistructured
or unstructured
Class Discussion – Give some examples of Tacit knowledge.
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 Enterprise Content Management Systems
• Help capture, store, retrieve, distribute, preserve documents
and semistructured knowledge
• Bring in external sources
– News feeds, research
• Tools for communication and collaboration
– Blogs, wikis, and so on
• Key problem: developing taxonomy ( Classification )
• Digital asset management systems ( used by Publishers ,
Broadcasters, Entertainment industry etc. )

Example –
1.IT companies use KMS to store resolutions of problem tickets raised by
customers for future reference and training purposes.
2. Consulting companies store ‘Lessons Learnt’ document for every project
delivered. 10
An Enterprise Content Management System
 Locating and Sharing Expertise

• Provide online directory of corporate experts in well-defined

knowledge domains
• Search tools enable employees to find appropriate expert in a
company ( e.g. ‘SameTime’ tool used by IBM )
• Social networking and social business tools for finding
knowledge outside the firm
– Saving
– Tagging
– Sharing web pages

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 Learning Management Systems (LMS)

• Provide tools for management, delivery, tracking, and

assessment of employee learning and training
• Support multiple modes of learning
– CD-ROM, web-based classes, online forums, and so on
– E-Learning
• Automates selection and administration of courses
• Assembles and delivers learning content
• Measures learning effectiveness
• Massively open online courses (MOOCs)
– Web course open to large numbers of participants

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 Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work

• Knowledge workers
– Researchers, designers, architects, scientists, engineers
who create knowledge for the organization
– Three key roles
• Keeping organization current in knowledge
• Serving as internal consultants regarding their
areas of expertise
• Acting as change agents, evaluating, initiating, and
promoting change projects
• Knowledge work systems
– Systems for knowledge workers to help create new
knowledge and integrate that knowledge into business
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 Requirements of Knowledge Work Systems

• Sufficient computing power for graphics, complex calculations

• Powerful graphics and analytical tools
• Communications and document management
• Access to external databases
• User-friendly interfaces
• Optimized for tasks to be performed (design engineering,
financial analysis)

Class Discussion : What other types of information systems would a

knowledge worker rely on, if any?

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Figure 11.4: Requirements of Knowledge
Work Systems
 Examples of Knowledge Work Systems

• CAD (computer-aided design)

– Creation of engineering or architectural designs
– 3D printing
• Virtual reality systems
– Simulate real-life environments
– 3D medical modeling for surgeons
– Augmented reality (AR) systems (e.g. Boeing 787 –
Dreamliner Training system for cabin maintenance )
– VRML ( Virtual Reality Modelling Language )

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 What Are the Business Benefits of Using
Intelligent Techniques for Knowledge
Management?
• Intelligent techniques: Used to capture individual and
collective knowledge and to extend knowledge base
– To capture tacit knowledge: Expert systems, case-based
reasoning, fuzzy logic
– Knowledge discovery: Neural networks and data mining
– Generating solutions to complex problems: Genetic
algorithms
– Automating tasks: Intelligent agents
• Artificial intelligence (AI) technology:
– Computer-based systems that emulate human behavior

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 What Is Artificial Intelligence?

• Artificial intelligence (AI)

– Consists of related technologies that try to simulate and
reproduce human thought and behavior
– Includes thinking, speaking, feeling, and reasoning
• AI technologies
– Involve computer application to areas that require
knowledge, perception, reasoning, understanding, and
cognitive abilities
– Concerned with generating and displaying knowledge
and facts

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AI Technologies Supporting Decision Making

• Decision makers use information technologies in decision-

making analyses of:
• What-is – Analysis used in transaction- processing
systems and management information systems
• What-if – Analysis used in decision support systems

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21
 Robots

• Involve application of AI
• Excel at performing simple, repetitive tasks
• Free workers from tedious or hazardous jobs
• Have limited mobility
• Operation is controlled by a computer program that
includes commands
• Includes programming languages for controlling
• Variable Assembly Language (VAL)

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 Expert Systems

• Mimics human expertise in a field to solve a problem in a

well-defined area
• Used for activities that human experts have already
handled successfully
• Tasks in medicine, geology, education, and oil
exploration
• Work with heuristic data which encourages applying
knowledge based on experience to solve or describe a
problem

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 Components of an Expert System

• Knowledge acquisition facility

– Software package
– Has manual or automated methods for acquiring and
incorporating new rules and facts so the expert system
is capable of growth
• Knowledge base
– Similar to a database, but in addition to storing facts
and figures it keeps track of rules and explanations
associated with facts
– Includes factual, heuristic, meta types of knowledge

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 Components of an Expert System
• Explanation facility
• Performs tasks similar to what a human expert does by
explaining to end users how recommendations are
derived
• Inference engine
• Similar to the model base component of a decision
support system
• Uses techniques of forward and backward chaining to
manipulate a series of rules
– Forward chaining: Series of “if-then-else” condition pairs is
performed
– Backward chaining: Expert system starts with the goal and
backtracks to find the right solution

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 Uses of Expert Systems

Forensics lab Banking and

Airline industry
work Finance

Personnel
Education Food industry
management

Security Government Agriculture

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 Criteria for Using Expert Systems

• Experience and knowledge of several experts is available

• Knowledge can be represented as rules or heuristics
• Decision or task has already been handled successfully by
human experts
• Decision or task requires consistency and standardization
• Subject domain is limited
• Decision or task involves many rules and complex logic
• Involves scarcity of experts in the organization
• Free of bias

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 Criteria for Not Using Expert Systems

• Very few rules are involved

• Existence of too many rules that slow down the processing
capability to unacceptable levels
• Well-structured numerical problems involved
• Broad range of topics is involved, but there are not many
rules
• Disagreement among experts

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 Case-Based Reasoning

• Problem-solving technique that matches a new case with a

previously solved case and its solution, stored in a
database
• Offers a solution after searching for a match
• Failing to find a match, human expert is required to
solve the problem

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 Intelligent Agents

• Software capable of reasoning and following rule-based

processes
• Popular in e-commerce
• Known as:
• Bots (short for robots)
• Virtual agents (VAs)
• Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs)

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Characteristics of Intelligent Agents

Adaptability

Autonomy

Collaborative behavior

Humanlike interface

Mobility

Reactivity

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 Applications of Intelligent Agents

• Web marketing: Collecting following information about

customers
– Items purchased
– Demographic information
– Expressed and implied preferences
• Virtual catalogs
• Display product descriptions based on customers’
previous experiences and preferences
• Responding to FAQ queries by any Portal ( e.g Travel
queries )

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Categories of Available Intelligent Agents

Shopping and
Personal
information

Monitoring and
Data-mining
surveillance

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 Fuzzy Logic Systems

• Rule-based technology that represents imprecision used

in linguistic categories (e.g., “cold,” “cool”) that represent
range of imprecise values
• Describe a particular phenomenon or process
linguistically and then represent that description in a
small number of flexible rules
• Provides solutions to problems requiring expertise that is
difficult to represent with IF-THEN rules
– Autofocus in cameras
– Detecting possible medical fraud
– Fuzzy Logics used in Washing Machines for various types of wash
cycles

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 Machine Learning

• How computer programs improve performance without explicit

programming
– Recognizing patterns
– Experience
– Prior learnings (database)
• Contemporary examples
– Google searches
– Recommender systems on Amazon, Netflix

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 Neural Networks

• Find patterns and relationships in massive amounts of

data too complicated for humans to analyze
• “Learn” patterns by searching for relationships, building
models, and correcting over and over again
• Humans “train” network by feeding it data inputs for
which outputs are known, to help neural network learn
solution by example
• Used in medicine, science, and business for problems in
pattern classification, prediction, financial analysis, and
control and optimization

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 Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Developed so that users can communicate with computers

in human language
• Provides question-and-answer setting that’s natural and
easier for people to use
• Useful with databases
• Use for:
• Call routing
• Stock and bond trading
• Banking by phone
• Medical Diagnostics ( e.g. Watson by IBM )
• Chat Bots

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 Categories in NLP Systems

• Interface to databases
• Machine translation
• Text scanning and intelligent indexing programs for
summarizing large amounts of text
• Generating text for automated production of standard
documents ( e.g. Reporting from Olympic Games )
• Speech systems for voice interaction with computers

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 Activities Performed by NLP Systems

• Interfacing
– Accepting human language as input
– Carrying out the corresponding command
– Generating the necessary output
• Knowledge acquisition
– Using the computer to read large amounts of text and
understand the information
– Summarize important points and store information so
the system can respond to inquiries about the content
– ( e.g. majority of reports and feeds from Olympic
games are machine produced , not written by
journalists )

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 Why is it so hard for computers to
understand humans?

Structured Data Unstructured Data

Physicist Birth Place

“One day, from among his city
Where was A. Einstein Ulm views of Ulm, Otto chose a
water color to send to Albert
Einstein N. Bohr Copenhagen Einstein as a remembrance of
born? M. Curie Warsaw Einstein´s birthplace”
Source: Spreadsheet, Database, etc. Source: http://www.schaeffenacker-ulm.de/en/otto.html

Person Organization

L. Gerstner IBM “If leadership is an art then

surely Jack Welch has proved
Welch ran J. Welch GE himself a master painter during
this? W. Gates Microsoft his tenure at GE”

Source: Jack Welch and the GE Way, Robert Slater

Source: Spreadsheet, Database, etc.
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 IBM Watson brings together a set of
transformational technologies to drive optimized
outcomes

Generates and
Understands evaluates
Natural hypothesis for
Language better outcomes
of human
speech

Adapts and …built on amassively parallel

Learns from probabilistic evidence-based
user selections
and responses architecture
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 Videos
Case 1: How IBM’s Watson Became a Jeopardy Champion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI-M7O_bRNg ( 10 mts ) Jeopardy and the

future of Watson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DywO4zksfXw ( How it answers – 6 mts )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7E1TJ1HtM0 ( how Watson works – 6 mts )

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Transforming how Business Thinks, Acts, and
Operates

Healthcare Financial Services

Diagnostic/treatment Investment and
assistance, evidenced- retirement planning,
based insights, institutional trading and
collaborative medicine decision support

Contact Center Government

Call center and techsupport Public safety, improved
services, enterprise information sharing,
knowledge management, security
consumer insight

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 Need to rethink what it will take to get ahead
tomorrow

Emerging IT
• Structured & unstructured (global)
Traditional IT •
•
Probabilistic Applications
Discovery Oriented
• Structured data (local) • Big Data Insights
• Deterministic Applications • Natural Language
• Search Oriented
• Query Results
• Machine Language
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“…to that place where
dreams are born…”

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