Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge Management
Humans started pretty early to preserve knowledge. One could see cave paintings as a first way of transforming an individuals knowledge into a publicly accessible knowledge. The evolution in knowledge transformation furthers goes on with the invention of hieroglyphics, paper and books. This development hits the 20th century with the emergence of computed document and information management, which claimed the creation of knowledge management tools. In the 21st century, knowledge management seems to reach its next level. Artificial intelligence comes into play and transforms again how knowledge is captured, developed, shared, and efficiently used within organisations.
How Artificial Intelligence boosts Knowledge Management
Liebowitz describes the concept of knowledge management (KM) bluntly as “creating value from an organisations intangible assets”. The main problem with his concept is to grasp the intangible assets, to address them, turn them into tangible pieces and make them accessible for the organisation as a whole. Therefore, the process of knowledge transformation has to undergo another innovation cycle. This time, the application and facilitation of Decision Support System (DSS) such as technological infrastructure in processing power or global connectivity and Artificial Intelligence (AI) become success drivers.
Having a closer look onto AI, its implementation into knowledge management systems is still in an early stage. Nonetheless, artificial intelligence is already able to address common problems of the domain, as it seems to be more present and accepted by chief knowledge officers and organisations at large. Knowledge management takes advantage of AI tools used to capture, filter, represent or apply knowledge. Using for example knowledge repositories like corporate Wikis or document storages, AI tools provide applications for the selection, parsing, analysis and classification of text, automated reasoning and visualisations to facilitate decision-making. Further, AI provides the means to process human input such as handwriting and voice recognition with the help of the advent of natural language processing. Moreover, expert and AI recommender systems help to boost knowledge management and provide the intelligence to use infrastructure more efficiently. Even more, AI helps users in the field of knowledge engineering and enables knowledge workers to see benefits in the usage of knowledge management tools. AI also helps to overcome the past problems of dealing with huge amounts of data, which were deemed unwieldy and difficult to maintain. Modern systems using AI are able to handle big data also providing a certain degree of security using new ways of data storing such as decentralised blockchain data storages for example. Dalkir (2013) further promotes Artificial Intelligence as an enabler of knowledge management tools, which according to him enhance collection, storing, and sharing of knowledge rather than information. Therefore, he mentions that capabilities of intelligent agents used in AI make them “proxies for knowledge workers”.
Knowledge Management versus Collaboration Tools
Knowledge Management was able to solve some of the problems, which have been perceived critical for its success in the last years. So to say, organisational cultures changed to be more team and collaboration-oriented. Hence, this development also brought up the need for new classes of tools such like collaboration tools. These tools have huge impact in the present work life and find acceptance among corporations and users alike. By ensuring constant sharing of knowledge and information these tools also seem to be key drivers for knowledge transfer in corporations.
Further, not only the handling of these tools appears convenient to the user, also the problem of ill designed and difficult-to-utilize software seems to be solved by collaboration tools. Taking the success of some of these tools like Slack or Hipchat into account, their presence in corporations seems to extinguish traditional knowledge management tools. When looking at collaboration tools, artificial intelligence also seems to take a major role in the future, by creating a so-called collaborative intelligence tools.
Furthermore, the creation of an intelligent enterprise relies on the usage of tools like these, to promote creative thinking, shared memory among groups or business units, interaction, feedback and crowdsourced quality control as well as peer review of the knowledge provided within AI assisted collaboration tools used for knowledge management. First steps towards this kind of knowledge management are already visible. AI-assisted problem-solving groupware such as GitHub are equipped with asynchronous messaging like threads, E-Mail or forums.
By providing knowledge workers with tools to actively and efficiently collaborate and thereby also creating a huge repository of valuable knowledge, another former pitfall seems to be circumvented. Even more, creating knowledge networks by using AI concepts like knowledge mapping and ontologies help organisations to identify and reward most valuable knowledge providers without the need of incentivising them in the first place.
A problem ahead?
Regardless of the new ways of knowledge sharing with AI empowered knowledge management systems and collaboration tools, organisations still have to deal with the omnipresent problem of cultures solely seeing “knowledge as power”. Even more, organisations also foster non-documented and replicable knowledge sharing in some ways. An example for this can be the “company community”-initiatives or any company non-work related activity aiming at enhancing the employee satisfaction by bringing them together. Such events are deemed to be the most powerful when it comes to sharing knowledge among employees. Hence, even though they are powerful, these events most likely create tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge. I believe, also this problem in knowledge management can be overcome to a certain extend. Introducing new techniques like scrum, to ensure daily conversation, discussion, updates and insights into how people work assisted through documentation by any mean of knowledge management or collaboration helps to further develop a consistent knowledge repository within organisations.
By then, it is not of primary interest to have knowledge management as one of the key components in a corporate strategic vision. Certainly, it then becomes part of the company culture. As long as the tools help to capture, develop, store, manage and share the provided inputs for the company, knowledge can be facilitated with artificial intelligence and accessed by the user when needed.
