KM and I

It is Monday morning, and 20 pairs of knowledge-hungry eyes are scheduled to see me in action for our Management Information Systems course. Our topic for today is Knowledge Management (KM).

KM is always in my heart, and talking about it would be quite a challenge when it is constrained within 2 hours. Nevertheless, I managed to "ramp through" the course content, and "stop for story-telling" at important points that I have more knowledge to share on. Knowing that the background of the students for this semester is a combination of those I never taught before, i.e., Economics and Social Development undergraduate students, I hope the knowledge that I share makes sense to them.

Throughout the lecture, I realized that I have gone through my own understanding of KM in three phases of life. My KM journey is spanned across the 24 years of my career growth, and this is how I categorize it:

Applied KM in organization

I first heard of KM from the beloved leader, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, back when he popularized his Vision 2020. I was "new to the market", as I crawled up the career ladder from Applications Programmer to Senior Software Consultant, at a renowned construction cost consultancy company.

One day, my supervisor, one of the Partners of the firm, called me up and gave me a small book on Knowledge Management. I consider it small because it was not as big and thick as the web development book he gave me years before that. It is his way to groom me for the next project he had in mind. Yes, he did that, and that was how I recognize him as my leader, my mentor.

Knowledge is managed within the company until today. Knowledge is the asset of the company, and it relies on this asset to be the leader of the industry, or at least to survive in the industry. In shifting the company to be fully digitalized, my supervisor ensured that I understood his vision of the Intranet system we were developing in early 2000. I came to realize during the development that KM is embedded in the company culture and working environment, as it became a module in the company Intranet. We also had Project Management (PM) module, but KM is still significant on its own, and we had to make sure that it is made available to everyone in the company.

As time went by, I saw how KM is implemented in different situations, formats, and needs:

• KM module in the Intranet system as a platform for knowledge acquisition, storage, dissemination, and application. Although knowledge in the firm is related to construction projects, the module covered more than that - not only the full aspect of the projects, but also the know-how, what-to-do-when, who-knows-what, and why-this-then-that of as many parts in a project as could be captured and managed.
• KM activities in face-to-face knowledge transfer and sharing sessions, e.g., trainings, talks or sharing sessions, and even "not-to-do" list short lectures. Back in those days, it was already understood by my supervisor on the needs of giving snippets of information, or "knowledge nuggets" in the form of short face-to-face "reminder" or "alert". In other words, keep it short and simple (KISS). Even for trainings, since the core business operations could not be disrupted too much, the training modules were devised to accommodate the constrained time and attention span of every employee.
• KM artefacts in publication of handbooks, newsletters, websites, Call-For-Interest brochures, business presentations, and books. Being a person with experience and portfolio of design works in hand, I was called upon to take up the tasks of content creation along with the content experts in the company. Apart from my supervisor, I worked with the staff of R&D department, and a retired Partner who was the Advisor of the company at that time. Through these productions that I saw the company vision slowly came to life.
• KM digitalization - from software to calibration with hardware in digitalizing the manual documents, in particularly architectural drawing. To my great surprise, my degree in Applied Mathematics somehow saved my day when I was in charge of calibrating CADMeasure (the AutoCAD for quantity surveying) with AtlesPro (our in-house tender documentation system). The challenge was to make the A0-sized "tablet" enabled and connected to the in-house software, which was developed using Visual Basic. On top of that, I had to create a menu template that is workable to identify the instructions from the "stylus pen" on the tablet, which would directly provide an input to the software with automated calculation of construction material measurement. In the planning of expanding my horizon, I was sent for trainings on other software too, including Autodesk Revit, now popularly known as Building Information Modeling (BIM). I could foresee more KM initiatives through these software, and how digitalization of knowledge could be implemented in the construction world, it is just a matter of extracting the niche out of the huge system to make it relevant to the core business.

With the long list of KM efforts practiced in this first company I worked with, the company became the point-of-reference, leading the industry towards digital knowledge transformation, and I am proud to say that I was involved in its journey.

KM at social and personal levels

I did a Master research on "How Intranet System Influences the KM Efforts in QS Firm", for a hybrid course of Master of Science (IT in Business). At this point of juncture, my KM Guru taught me the "social science aspect" of KM, and it was through my understanding that I relate it with the IT system in the company. When I started my PhD, after searching high and low for a Guru in the domain of KM-IT hybrid, I was lost in translation.

The KM Guru I met was my dear PhD supervisor, Prof Dr Mohd Sharifuddin Ahmad, who spent so much effort in converting me into a "KM-in-AI" believer. For the first 3 years of my PhD journey, my context awareness on KM was still the "human aspect", the social science domain. AI was very new to me, and technically it was beyond my cognitive capacity.

My supervisor advised me to "look inside" when the quest of "looking outside" is to no avail. So, for my research, I understood more on Personal KM (PKM), and I postulated that we perform PKM in our daily life, as follows:

• Get/retrieve knowledge - we acquire new knowledge in various formats and from various sources
• Understand/analyze knowledge - we need to analyze to understand the knowledge we have acquired, and it will require use to decodify, verify, and confirm the knowledge, as well as understand how to apply that knowledge
• Share/publish knowledge - when we share or try to explain the new knowledge to someone else, we will understand more on what we know, hence the learning cycle
• Connect to knowledge source - in order to perform all the above, we need to connect to the knowledge source that may be in any form, e.g., documents, files, and even people

The confusion during the early stage of PhD have caused me to explore the unknown territory of applied "internal" domain, and this slowly brought me to the next level of technicality in KM.

KM system with AI

My PhD journey witnessed how I have cracked open the KM practices, both at organizational and personal levels, with a system design of (multi) intelligent agents to emulate human way of managing knowledge. It would be too ambitious to depict a huge KM System when the research requires niche area, hence I focused on the granular level of KM adoption.

In my model, I managed to categorize the KM activities further in 3 phases for an agent-mediated PKM, initially called Detection-Prediction-Action, which were then improved into the following phases:

• Detect - consists of an agent to identify new knowledge from the knowledge sources
• Determine - consists of two agents, one to decide the method to use based on insights from knowledge repository, and another to "drive" the next agent based on urgency of the knowledge to the users
• Direct - consists of an agent that drives the performance of communicating the knowledge, either to share to others or just store it in the repository, and this requires connection to the knowledge sources

At granular level, software agents could be "humanized" with the KM mundane tasks commonly performed by humans. However, the application of knowledge acquired (retrieved), analyzed (understood), amplified (made known to others), and associated (connected) is still in the hands and minds of the humans.

#knowledgemanagement #PKM #aKM