William P. Hall

Biological Nature of Knowledge in the Learning Organization

This paper combines ideas from disciplines ranging from physics, epistemology and philosophy of science to military affairs, to sketch a scientific framework for studying organizational learning, knowledge and memory. Threads are woven from this background into a generic analytical framework that reveals the biological nature of knowledge in learning organizations. There are many epistemological and conceptual difficulties surrounding the concept of autopoiesis, so most of the present work focuses on explaining it in generic terms, establishing an epistemological framework in which the autopoietic status of any kind of complex system can be evaluated, and then deriving generic concepts of memory, learning and knowledge within the autopoietic framework. The autopoietic status of human organizations is then tested in relation to this framework, and some of the direct implications regarding organizational learning and adaptation are highlighted.

Emerging Autopoietic Communities - Scalability of Knowledge Transfer in Complex Systems

Knowledge-based communities are important but poorly understood systems for helping enterprises maintain their organizational integrity and address organizational imperatives. Based on an autopoietic theory of organization, we examine the emergence and development of knowledge-based communities at different scales up to large distributed enterprises and industry clusters. Knowledge-based communities are highly complex systems that evolve and mature through the phased emergence of new features and capabilities. Development and support of successfully sustainable communities needs to be based on a better understanding of how these features and capabilities emerge. To comprehend the impact of emergent behavior within and beyond organizational communities requires an understanding of the social or sociological aspects of a system in relation to the explicit formal/physical structures in the organization.

Organisational Management of Project and Technical Knowledge Over Fleet Lifecycles

Complex engineered products are all knowledge intensive. It is crucial for suppliers and operators of such “fleets” of equipment to manage and minimize product costs and risks. Many schedule delays, cost overruns, accidents, excessive operating costs, and premature product failures result from ineffective management of product data, information, and knowledge. This paper reviews solutions based on integrating structured authoring and product lifecycle management systems and data warehousing implemented by a large project engineering and management organization and the development of an alliance organizational form to support the product to reduce costs, risks and hazards through comprehensive and coherent management of project data, information and knowledge.

One Company – Two: Outcomes Knowledge Integration vs. Corporate Disintegration in the Absence of Knowledge Management

Purpose – To learn to avoid pitfalls there is need to accept and understand failures. This anonymous case study aims to report a major organisational failure due to the absence of effective knowledge management, where both the reasons for, and organisational consequences of, the failure are fairlyclear.Design/Methodology/Approach – Within a theoretical framework of organisational autopoiesis, the case study compares knowledge management styles from two eras in the history of one engineering project management company: as it grew from an acquired site with a single project to a multi-divisional leader in its regional market, and then as it failed in its original line of business to the point where it divested most of its assets.Findings – In the first era, the executive and line managers were permissive, allowing project teams to work out local solutions for business problems as they arose producing successful and profitable solutions. The decline began and accelerated when management strengthened hierarchical command and control that stifled knowledge sharing and solution development at the work face and exceeded line managers’ limits of rationality.Research limitations/implications – This study has the limitations of any historical study of a single case, exacerbated by a need to maintain the anonymity of the surviving company.Originality/value – Few studies so clearly highlight the critical importance of personal knowledge and its sharing in knowledge intensive organisations for maintaining successful operations. Success may have many parents, but in this case the internal comparisons identify specific factors that caused a successful organisation to disintegrate.

Chromosome Variation, Genomics, Speciation and Evolution in Sceloporus Lizards

The clade of the North American lizard genus Sceloporus and its relatives comprising the subfamily Phrynosomatinae (Iguanidae) includes perhaps 150 evolutionary lineages. The work reviewed here begins with the discovery of the concentration of Robertsonian chromosomal variability in Sceloporus more than 40 years ago and cytogenetic and genomic evidence of remarkable chromosomal variation within the S. grammicus complex associated with narrow zones of hybridization between different chromosomal races. These discoveries led to hypotheses about hybrid zones involving negative heterosis, possible modes of chromosomal speciation, and the potential roles of such speciation in phylogenesis. The radiation of Sceloporus has now been studied by many different workers extending and mapping the geographic distribution of cytogenetic and genomic variation to understand the biology of the chromosomal variation and to establish the phyletic relationships of the various lineages. The result is a robust phylogeny and a large and still growing database of genic, cytogenetic and other biological parameters. These materials provide a rich series of natural experiments to support both synthetic-comparative and analytical studies of the roles of chromosomal variation, hybrid zones and modes of speciation in phylogenesis and evolutionary success.

Managing Technical Documentation for Large Defence Projects: Engineering Corporate Knowledge

Documentation activities may account for 10% of the acquisition cost of major Aerospace and Defence systems. Document content requires strict management, yet needs to be replicated (and be kept identical across many uses of the same information). Tenix encountered these issues with support documents for the 10 ANZAC Frigates it is building for the Australian and New Zealand Navies, and the situation was growing more difficult with each Ship delivered. Tenix contracted Aspect Computing to implement RMITs SIM (Structured Information Manager) to manage documents and content. Compared to the word processing system it replaces, SIM reduced the number of maintenance routines needing management for the class of 10 ships from around 20,000 to less than 2,000. Reuse of redundant texts within procedures will provide another 50% reduction, for an overall 95% reduction in text requiring management. With comparatively little additional development effort SIM technology can substantially improve a wide range of documentation processes and reduce costs throughout the project cycle.

Social Networking Tools for Knowledge-Based Action Groups

Urban bureaucrats are often overburdened with limited time and little genuine knowledge relating to decisions they must make within their briefs that impact community members. Consequently, bureaucrats often work at what Herbert Simon called the bounds of their rationality. Community groups concerned with particular issues may emerge that have issue-related local knowledge; and probably also the time and effort to share and assemble such knowledge into practical and informative group proposals. This chapter considers knowledge-based roles and dynamics of community groups, looks at revolutionary socio-technical capabilities able to support and extend group aims effectiveness, and presents a template based on social computing technologies to demonstrate how the technology can be deployed. Properly used, the tools can connect bureaucrats with the power to decide and act with the local knowledge and motivation to make rational decisions about allocation of resources, etc., to deal with various kinds of situations. The template developed for this project demonstrates the capabilities of the cloud computing tools.

Knowledge Reuse in Project Management

This paper discusses the initial stages of a research in progress addressing knowledge reuse issues in a project management environment and explores how project management companies manage project knowledge. The project tests the statement that the effective transfer of tacit, implicit and explicit knowledge plays a critical role in a project management environment.

Knowledge Management in BID Preparation for Global Engineering and Manufacturing Projects

The core competence of a global engineering and manufacturing enterprise increasingly depends on the quality of its intellectual resources and how these resources are used in critical missions such as bid preparation. This paper discusses the knowledge management issues in the development of VIEWBID, a web-based system for supporting online bidding document preparation for global engineering and manufacturing projects. The VIEWBID system aims to supports inter-enterprise collaboration for compiling accurate bids. The enterprise engineering architectures and methodologies, such as VERA and iRoadmap, have been used to analyze the bidding process to capture different levels of procedural knowledge. A set of component-based technologies has been developed using XML and Java to capture, configure and compose the bidding documents.