Knowledge Management is a strategies and processes designed to identify, capture, structure, value, leverage, and share an organization’s intellectual assets to enhance its performance and competitiveness. It is based on two critical activities: (1) capture and documentation of individual explicit and tacit knowledge, and (2) its dissemination within the organization. Other other hand, Systems thinking is a management discipline that concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the components that comprise the entirety of that defined system.
( The Business Dictionary, http://www.businessdictionary.com/defi nition/knowledge-management.html)
Hi, Ali. Knowledge Management (KM) seems to be in need of a decentralizing revolution for empowering individuals and self-organized groups to be based on networked autonomous personal KM devices and a personal discipline for collection, filtering and creative connection (among data, among people, and between people and data flows) (Levy, 2012). Although the mounting urgency for such a solution is apparent (Wiig, 2011; Gratton, 2012; Nielsen, 2012; Frey & Osborne, 2013; Bowles, 2014), the inherent complexities for devising it constitute ‘wicked’ problems (ill-defined; incomplete, contradictory, changing requirements; complex interdependencies) where the information needed to understand the challenges depends upon one’s idea or concept for solving them (Rylander, 2009).
System thinking and Design Science Research (DSR) guidelines (Hevner et al., 2004) aimed are essential to address knowledge assets and their dynamic relationships/processes as well as to integrate a varied scope of KM concepts and practices, such as associative indexing (Bush, 1945), cumulative synthesis (Usher, 1954), attention management (Simon, 1971), personal autonomy (Nonaka, 2000), aggregatable ‘nano’ performances (Wiig, 2011), or creative conversations (Levy, 2012).
The aim of a current DSR project is to develop such a novel KM concept supported by an innovative IT prototype system (that extend human and social capabilities and meet desired outcomes) and to validate the underlying system thinking and design science research processes (as evidence of their relevance, utility, rigor, resonance, and publishability). The continued non-availability of such personal KM systems and tools inhibits organizations (Pasher & Ronen, 2011), academia (Bedford, 2012), and the creative class (Florida, 2012) due to non-effective tools (Kahle, 2009; Davies, 2011), lacking work force acceptance of traditional KM system generations (Wilson, 2002; Schuett, 2003; Malhotra, 2004; Pollard, 2008; Frost, 2013), and escalating opportunity divides (Drori, 2010; Giebel, 2013).
The full references and further details are accessible via a series of recent multi-disciplinary publications and presentations on my reserchgate page. Related to the initial context of KM and System Thinking, I suggest the article below as a starting point:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308345425
Very exhaustive information on system thinking and knowledge management already highlighted by colleagues. The attached articles would also give your further comprehensive information on their relationship. Best regards
Hi,
in my KM framework, system thinking would be treated as one approach to knowledge creation. Most system thinking systems that I used enabled modelling of the phenomenon of interest and then simulating desired outcomes by changing model elements' parameters.
Meliha
I think the relationship is symbiotic.
Knowledge management provides the knowledge and methods that informs the application of the principles of system dynamics. System dynamics, in turn, provides feedback that improves the knowledge and methods.
I think that knowledge management and system dynamics need to be applied in a common context. The word "think" is intended to hedge my conclusion a bit for I am fond of looking at problems through lenses that may appear to be unrelated to the context in question. I seems to sometimes solve problems in one domain from the point of view of another domain.
Jim
The Knowledge Management and Systems Dynamic structure is, to my way of thinking, dependent upon the context in which the issue to be resolved exists (set aside for a moment my comment, "looking at problems through lenses that may appear to be unrelated to the context in question").
Suppose the context was supply chains. One might then adopt methods as outlined in Supply Chain Council. (n.d.). Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model: Overview, Version 10.0. Retrieved from http://supply-chain.org/f/SCOR-Overview-Web.pdf.
However, you raise an interesting issue regarding discovery. Given a knowledge set, how would one go about discovering the contents and meaning, and the appropriate methods to use on that set? I suppose some sort of an approach to contextual analysis would be in order.
In a way it's like walking up the door of a library and wondering what it includes. Except one has a leg up through the card catalog.
I think one is also able to discover new methods. See Wong, J. I. (2016, March 25). Google’s AI Won the Game Go by Defying Millennia of Basic Human Instinct. Retrieved September 17, 2017, from https://qz.com/639952/googles-ai-won-the-game-go-by-defying-millennia-of-basic-human-instinct/ for some tantalizing clues.
Jim