Archive for category Readings
The Experience Factory
During the literature study of my Ph.D. thesis I came across an interesting concept, which I would like to briefly write about here. Even before the term knowledge management became popular, Victor R. Basili presented his experience factory [1].
The principle behind that is that a software developing organization should gather the gained experience and make it accessible to learn from it in the future. To archive that, the whole idea builds upon a division of responsibilities. On the one hand there is the project organization, which covers the project work and tasks. On the other hand is the experience factory, which encapsulates the whole experience recording and leveraging for the whole organization.
In the experience factory all kinds of experience that can be externalized and made available are analysed and synthesised. That includes the outcome of project reviews or documentation. This is then taken and bundled into standardized packages, in order to make the experience easier to access. Developers can thus access these experience packages in the experience base, once they feel the need for further input. At the end of every learning process, the developer has to feed the gained insights back into the experience base, to make it richer. The methodology thus applies the two basic activities in knowledge management: collecting experience and learning to improve.
The experience factory is a widely known concept and implemented in different organizations. The most famous one is the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which documents a dramatic increase of reuse across different projects [2]. It can be seen though, that it is difficult to implement and contains a huge organizational overhead. But the principles applied make a lot of sense. It is worth thinking about it, I suppose.
[1] Victor R. Basili. »Software Development: A Paradigm for the Future«, Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 89), 1989.
[2] Victor R. Basili and Gianluigi Caldiera. »Improve Software Quality by Reusing Knowledge and Experience«, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1995.
Engaged Scholarship
During the summer school and the conference I recently attended, the topic was engaged scholarship. Since Van de Ven published his book [1] in 2007, this topic has been broadly discussed, especially in the Scandinavia information systems community. Reason enough for me to take a closer look at the book and a brief explanation, why it makes a lot of noise in northern Europe.
Any researcher’s target is to advance the body of knowledge, but also to enlighten practice of a profession. The gap between theory and practice is a sign that this did not always work satisfactorily. With engaged scholarship Van de Ven describes an approach that should help this dilemma. He wants to support the collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Engaged scholarship does not understand research as a solitary exercise, but as a combined effort.
the more complex the problem or the bigger the research question, the greater the level of engagement is required of researchers from different disciplines and practitioners with different functional experiences.
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Four research activities should take part during a research, according to his ideas: problem formulation, theory building, research design and problem solving. He points out that these are not held in any specific order. Sometimes, it even makes sense to have a two in parallel. Additionally it can be beneficial or even required to conduct several iterations and revisions of the research activities.
As space is very limited here, I can only provide a brief overview and point out to read the book. It’s worth it!
Problem Formulation. To describe the problem properly is a vital part of every research. The target of any problem formulation should be the research question. It provides the implications for the next steps and can be used later to evaluate the work. Not only is this commonly the first task in the engaged scholarship process, but also influences it the following ones strongly.
Theory Building. As the theory in engaged scholarship has to be connected to reality, it is very important to choose a fitting one. This usually involves three activities: Conceiving or creating a theory, constructing or elaborating a theory and justifying or evaluating a theory.
Research Design. It is important to understand, that the theory is not the same as the model. A research model instead acts like an instrument to link data with the theory. As theory cannot be observed directly, a research model is designed instead. Dependent on the research question two basic epistemologies can be used. One is the variance model, which is outcome-driven, and the other one is the process model, which is event-driven.
Problem Solving. The researcher’s present is organized that every research leads to a form of written and/or presentation. It is assumed that work will be used, if it is good/influential enough. It can be observed, that much research is hardly used by other researchers (low citations is common) and in practice (difficulties to find and to adopt). The important thing is thus to find appropriate ways to communicate the findings of a research by engaging the intended audience.
While the kind of research that Van de Ven describes as engaged scholarship might be a bit revolutionary for the American information systems research community, this is actually common practice in Scandinavia. Lars Mathiassen and Peter Axel Nielsen analyzed the articles in the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) and compare their research process to the engaged scholarship process [2]. They found that the Scandinavian IS research tradition is in line with engaged scholarship and many papers applied its values and principles long before the book was published. For further information I would like to refer to the author and his blog entry.
Personally, I enjoyed reading the book. Not only because I noticed to be in an engaged scholarship myself, but also because Van de Ven describes the details of conducting the process in depth and comprehensive.
[1] Andrew H. Van de Ven. »Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research«, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
[2] Lars Mathiassen and Peter Axel Nielsen. »Engaged Scholarship in IS Research«, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 20, No. 2, Pages 3-20, 2008.
Polanyi’s Tacit Dimension
Most of the research regarding knowledge management has some relation, be it directly or not, to Michael Polanyi’s book »The Tacit Dimension«[1], published in 1966. He was a polymath born in Hungary, who published thoughts and works in fields across economics, philosophy and physical chemistry.
»The Tacit Dimension« is divided into three different lectures. The first one is called Tacit Knowing and the author explains that all knowledge is rooted in and consists of comprehension. The second lecture with the title Emergence deals with the structure of tacit knowledge and that it determines the structure of comprehensive entities. In the final part with the name Society of Explorers he discusses the major influence of the scientific skepticism and the moral perfectionism, which was suppressed by religious movements until the 20th century, to the intellectual, moral and social progress.
As I mentioned before the whole book is very interesting and nice to read. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in this field. For this entry I would like to focus on the first lecture in the book, as that is a strong influence to my studies.
we can know more than we can tell.
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Polanyi has a simple example what tacit knowledge is: When you walk around in the city, you might meet hundreds of people you have never seen before. But still, the moment there is someone you know, you recognize the person. Have you ever asked yourself how or why?
Polanyi defines four different aspects of tacit knowing:
- The functional structure of tacit knowing is the attendance from features to a target. We recognize people (target), because we are aware of their looks (features).
- The phenomenal structure of tacit knowing has a lot to do with apprehension. We are aware that we would recognize people on the street, if we meet them.
- The semantic aspect of tacit knowing tends to displace all meaning away from ourselves. If we use a tool, and we are accustomed to it, we locate the tool’s effect (the meaning of its impact) on ourselves (e.g., our hand).
- The ontological aspect of tacit knowing establishes the relation of what the knowledge the tacit knowledge is. This helps us understanding the comprehensive entity from relying on our awareness of its particulars. Once we recognize someone, we are aware to know that person.
Then Polanyi continues and explains that we can influence our tacit knowledge by practicing. If you start learning to play the piano, you have to concentrate to push the right keys with the right pressure and timing. Professional piano players push the right keys on the piano in an incredible speed while playing a piece. Musicians refer to it as “the fingers know their way”. If the player tries to focus on every aspect and to conscious play the piano, mistakes of many different kinds would arise. The player would lose (temporally) the naturalness. That counts for many thing we do in our everyday life: Walking, driving a car, typing on a key board, etc.
This action of rehearsing until something becomes tacit knowledge is called internalization. We gain the naturalness by practicing and comprehending the actions. There are many examples in our everyday life for this, like riding a bike or throwing a ball.
Throughout the whole book Polanyi adds many different views on the tacit knowledge. It is extremely well and interesting written; theories and ideas are explained in very colorful examples that are easy to comprehend.
[1] Michael Polanyi, »The Tacit Dimension«. London: Routlefge & Kegan Paul, 1966.