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48 Chapter 2

Knowledge creation may occur through R & D projects, innovations by individuals
to improve the way in which they perform their tasks, experimentation, reasoning
with existing knowledge, and by hiring new people. Knowledge creation may also
be accomplished through knowledge importing (e.g., eliciting knowledge from
experts, from procedure manuals, by a joint venture to obtain technology, or by
transferring people between departments). Finally, knowledge may be created through
observing the real world (e.g., site visits, observing processes after the introduction of
a change).
Knowledge analysis consists of:
• Extracting what appears to be knowledge from obtained material (e.g., analyze tran-
scripts and identify themes, listen to an explanation, and select concepts for further
consideration)
• Abstracting extracted materials (e.g., from a model or a theory)
• Identifying patterns extracted (e.g., trend analysis)
• Explaining relations between knowledge fragments (e.g., compare and contrast,
causal relations)
• Verifying that extracted materials correspond to meaning of original sources (e.g.,
meaning has not been corrupted through summarizing, collating, etc.)
Knowledge synthesis or reconstruction consists of generalizing analyzed material
to obtain broader principles, generating hypotheses to explain observations, establish-
ing conformance between new and existing knowledge (e.g., corroborating validity in
light of what is already known), and updating the total knowledge pool by incorporat-
ing the new knowledge.
Codifying and modeling knowledge addresses how we represent knowledge in our
minds (e.g., mental models), how we then assemble the knowledge into a coherent
model, how we document the knowledge in books and manuals, and how we encode
it in order to post it to a knowledge repository.
Finally, knowledge is organized for specifi c uses and according to an established
organizational framework (e.g., standards, categories). Some examples would include
a help desk service or a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the company
intranet. This organization is usually done using some form of knowledge ontology
(conceptual model) and taxonomy (classifi cation rules). Examples would include an
offi cial list of keywords or categories, knowledge object attribute specifi cations, and
guidelines for translation.
Holding knowledge consists of remembering, cumulating knowledge in reposito-
ries, embedding knowledge in repositories, and archiving knowledge. Remembering