1. Introduction
Although I come from the
Artificial Intelligence business, I retain that
Knowledge Management has only an indirect relation with
AI. For example, Office Automation
problems exhibit features which, for KM,
are not less relevant than AI.
Nevertheless, I think that AI should gain a more
recognised citizenship in KM, and this is possible
if we look at it from a somewhat forgotten point of view; a point of view which,
on the contrary, was one of the most important motivations of
AI researches. I am thinking about the streamline
started by H. Simon's issues about traditional utilitaristic (or neo-classical)
foundations of Economic Theory.
As is well-known, according to Keynes, H. Simon rejected the axiom of
"complete comparability" of rational choices and that of
"transitivity of preferences", substituting them with a theory of
"limited cognitive capabilities", or "limited rationality".
In this framework, "intentionality" cannot be understood outside a
contextualised (or "situated", we would say nowadays)
meaning attribution.
The new keyword was heuristic, to be understood as a tool for acting with
limited resources in limited informed situations.
It follows that knowledge-making and decision-making
depend also on "irrational" parameters, such as emotions, common visions,
social contexts, personal and collective beliefs, personal and collective sensemaking
processes (1).
2. The economic scenario
When goods were characterised by long life-cycles, that is, when technologies were used to produce the same goods for long intervals of times, the "needed knowledge", for any production process, was embedded (at least in principle) in firms using the hierarchical templates of work organisation, so that it was transmitted and received by pouring it through the given hierarchical channels. Any new knowledge was usually achieved through planned "education programs" and class-room teaching, well defined both from a physical and a temporal point of view.
This was possible because a firm was thought of as a "closed system", where any interaction with the external world was planned in advance. In turn, this was justifiable because the customer-supplier cycle was long in nature and, finally, this was made possible by the technological characteristics of the products and by the relative immaturity of the market (it seems that Ford used to say "People want black cars because I produce only black cars").
On the contrary, nowadays we are living in an advanced stage of a migration process from the above scenario, sometimes characterised by the term "mass production" (production dominates market) to a new one called of "mass customisation" (the reverse of the former) in which life-cycles of goods and services and their technological evolutions, are subjected to a strong acceleration, general and new in the industrial history.
From a purely economic point of view, we are facing the following connected phenomena:
1) the stability in time of goods decreases, while the differentiation of the
production factors increases;
2) the functional dependence between "production process efficiency" and
"production process value" decreases, while the dependence between production
factors increases.
3. New management, decision making and knowledge management
The loose connection between efficiency and value together with
the tight connection between different production processes, makes
a reliable computation of the marginal effects of economic initiatives almost
impossible.
Economic "predictions" become more and more subjective "expectations" and decisions
(for instance investment decisions) rely less and less on some form of "objective" or
"rational" evidence.
Under another perspective, we can say that the "mass customisation era" is characterised by
open (and distributed) systems and not by closed systems as
used to happen before.
Because of the intrinsic complexity and the intrinsic dynamics of
open distributed systems, we can hardly now view decisions as means for
implementing a meaningful interpretation of the world.
On the contrary, sometimes they are now described as means for making
meaningful interpretations of worlds which basically are confused among themselves
(2).
Moreover, explicit and coded knowledge becomes less and less effective,
whereas management has a less and less precise idea of what explicit and coded
knowledge is needed in order to maintain a sustainable competition in time.
Indeed, myths, metaphors, redundancy and tacit knowledge become fundamental tools
in organisations, as we have learned, for instance, from the best Japanese experiences.
Preferences, beliefs and knowledge, on the one hand, together with problems and solutions,
on the other hand, are interactively constructed by means of
enactment and
sensemaking processes.
Thereafter, we cannot regard information, meaning and knowledge as something that
is objectively embedded in a code that a receiver shares with a
source, any longer. On the contrary, we basically do not know the "code"
used in the message, for the simple reason that the interpretation conditions, the sender
context, the receiver context and so on, change
continuously so that any "message" must be reconstructed interactively
(whatever the source-receiver link is: outside world-human, human-computer,
human-human, me-you, me-me).
Therefore, the structuralistic pouring model
has to be transposed into the enacting model
(that, incidentally, is coherent with Peirce's interpretation theory), in which interpretation is a dynamically contextualised constructive act.
The former model parallels the rigidity of "mass product-oriented" work organisations, the limited variety of their products, their vertical divisional structures and the predetermined form of their information flows. On the contrary the latter is conceptually connected to network-based organisations with flattened hierarchical levels and co-operative forms of knowledge creation and circulation. A kind of organisation that is more reactive and more "mass customisation-oriented".
4. Determination problems and choice problems
The enacting model could be formalised in a few steps, starting from the following diagrams -see (3):
As Lawvere and Schanuel explain in
(4),
finding raw d (in the left diagram) is a
"determination problem": roughly speaking,
I have a process q with input A and output C and
I have to determine a sub-process d that after a sub-process s
with input A and partial output B, makes it possible to complete
the transformation of A into C. Applying recursively this procedure
we obtain a top-down and forward "factorisation" of our original process d.
This is exactly the procedure usually applied in the "mass product" era.
However, nowadays we face the problem illustrated by the right diagram above:
I start from the output C (because C is now conceptually an input,
not an output. Namely it is the input given by the contextual space, for instance the market)
and I must backtrack to understand what I eventually need before
the sub-processes recursively linked to the conceptual input C,
say d, in order to obtain a hypothetical process that transforms a resource
A into C. In this way I achieve a top-down and
backward reconstruction of the needed process q. According to Lawvere and Schanuel,
this is a "choice problem".
5. The det-choice approach
The interdefinition between choice and determination, induces a backward-forward double and syncronic analysis (that we can shortly call "det-choice" approach) that cannot be seen as a traditional top-down approach. In fact the top-down methodologies are characterised by the functionalistic point of view, according to which it is possible to analyse a complex entity (such as a complex problem or a complex process) in terms of atomic constituents on which the given entity functionally depends. These functional components are achieved through a one-way breaking down process.
Now, let us see a possible pre-formalization of this approach.
From a conceptual point of view, d is what I need to get q
after a given s. That is, an implication
from left (before) to right (after):
d=sàq.
Dually, s is what we need before a given
d to obtain q . Hence it is an implication from right (after) to
left (before):
s=qßd.
(In a sense, it is this "coming back from the future" that neutralises the rational
and deterministic, although unreliable, forecast of marginal effects).
Henceforth, what we intend as a meaningful world is both determined and chosen:
The det-choice approach does not imply that real world must be conceived as a subjective construction, but, according to F. Varela, as a hammer beating on a piano keyboard with a constant and uniform movement. On the contrary, the piano itself can freely move to the right and the left, at different speed. It is this subjective movement that creates music. That is to say, we are not "played by the external world", but we and the external world play together (9).
6. Enactment, open systems and decision making
In accordance with the enactment philosophy, decision making is more an interpretative
act than a rational choice, as was observed in the specialised literature (10).
Henceforth, since language, symbols, common vision and social interaction
are part of any organisation's sensemaking, they are part of any decision, implicitly
or explicitly.
"Organisations are communication and ambiguous action networks,
in which solution gaps are filled mainly with a system of reciprocal commitments,
having fuzzy and variable contours. Fixed routines and formal roles are minor
ingredients." (11).
"And", we could add, "in which explicit knowledge gaps are filled with
tacit knowledge", that is a knowledge that does not respect the organisation
hierarchies and their parallel organised information flows.
7. The role of Knowledge Management
If we accept the above conceptual framework, then
KM with its capability to collect and organise,
to some extent, tacit knowledge and to mix it with explicit and formal knowledge,
should be seen as a tool for implementing the famous "plausible reasoning"
required by H. Simon's "limited rationality" hypothesis.
In other words, KM should be a tool,
or rather a system of different tools, for supporting that weakened form of
"rational reasoning" which is required in such a fluctuating, atomised and
parcelled framework.
The "top-down (one-way) philosophy", so old and so venerable,
and its related tree-like
organisation discipline, must then be substituted by an "actor-based"
philosophy according to which, (almost) autonomous actors interact among
themselves in many ways, in order to make views, to associate in temporary teams,
to react and pro-act in the environment.
8. Conclusions
This transition from a transformational
setting to a reactive one, is made dramatic
and pressing by the globalisation process.
Any comment or question about the ideas and concept introduced in this paper, are welcome
(2). J. G. March, "A primer on Decision Making. How Decisions Happen", The Free Press, New York, 1994, page 189
(3). P. Pagliani, Knowledge and Knowledge Management (in Italian), "Prometheus" (in print).
(4). F. W. Lawvere, S. H. Schanuel, "Teoria delle Categorie". Franco Muzzio, 1994.
(5). One could apply a more radical inversion, namely a "bottom-up" approach (that is, "from particular to general"). I think that this is too dangerous, at least for medium-large organisations, since it risks curing an organisational atrophy by means of an organisational anomie.
(6). This dialectic "determinism-choice" is absolutely general. In fact, notice that a decision is really a choice when it is linked to deterministic effects while it is not a choice when it induces random effects. In this case I do not choose anything.
(7). P. Pagliani, Modalizing Relations by means of Relations: a general framework for two basic approaches to Knowledge Discovery in Database. In "Proc. of the International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems. IPMU '98", July, 6-10, 1998. Paris, France, pp. 1175-1182.
(8). P. Pagliani, "A Practical Introduction to the Modal-Relational Approach to Approximation Spaces". In L. Polkowski, A. Skowron (eds.): Rough Sets in Knowledge Discovery 1, Physica-Verlag, 1998, Ch. 11, pp. 209-232.
(9). F. Varela, Il reincanto del concreto. In P. L. Capucci (a cura di) "Il corpo tecnologico", Bologna, Baskerville, 1994, pp. 143-159.
(10). K. E. Weick, "Sensemaking in Organization". Beverly Hills, Sage, 1995, page 185.
(11). L. Biggiero & D. Laise, Determinism and intentionality in some research traditions in Economics and Management. (In Italian). In M. Cini (ed.) "Caso, Necessità, Libertà". CUEN, 1998, page 146 (my translation).
(12). Isn't a modern Company a "packet" qua connected and individualised body, but a "wave" qua organism continuously pervading the external world and continuously pervaded by it? Isn't the active participation of both customers and suppliers in the value chain of the Company, an example of participation of the observer in the observed phenomena?
(13). "In the "transformational" paradigm, the system reads an input, processes it and produces an output. The input is here the initial query and the output is any possible answer context C. [...] In the "reactive" paradigm, several agents interact together by exchanging messages. There is no notion of input and output in this case; the initial query is used only for the purpose of bringing into life certain agents. The answer context C acts as a medium of communication between agents." ( J. M. Andreoli, R. Pareschi: Communication as Fair Distribution of Knowledge. In "Proc. of OOPSLA'91", Phoenix, USA, 1991).
(14). First, let us observe that an organization is characterized by essentially two kinds of behaviours: internal distribution [...], external cooperation [...] . The distinction about the two operations available for an organization to handle different kinds of tasks gives us an interesting insight on the sharing of knowledge in object-oriented systems." (J. M. Andreoli, R. Pareschi , LO and behold! concurrent structured processes. In "Proc. of OOPSLA'90", Ottawa, Canada, 1990).