The Methods To Represent And Analyze Organizational Knowledge By Using Network Model

How to represent organizational knowledge is a central and principal problem in organizational knowledge management. The problem includes such following questions: what is organizational knowledge? How about its composition? How much knowledge in an organization? And where is it? Obviously, the problem is very principal and important in organizational knowledge management, which can help us know the contents or objects of organizational knowledge management. However, because of the ambiguity and complexity of knowledge, it's really very difficult to represent organizational knowledge, especially to construct a quantitative model to represent and analyze organizational knowledge intensively and validly.To resolve these problems, based on the analysis of its structure and compositions, the dissertation aims to propose some methods to modeling the structure and knowledge stocks of organizational knowledge by using network models. The dissertation also suggests some possible applications of the models proposed in the paper. The results and achievements can be summarized as follows:1. The network models and their modeling methods to the structure of organizational knowledge.Based on the analysis of the structure and compositions together with the storage media of organizational knowledge, the knowledge network model (K-K network) and knowledge supemetwork model (KSN) are proposed in the paper. The K-K network model can represent the structure and compositions of organizationaI-knowledge and some of its knowledge fields, and can also represent the structure & compositions of individual knowledge. The KSN model, in which organizational knowledge and its storage media are integrated into a supernetwork, can not only represent the structure of organizational knowledge, but also can represent how it is stored in different storage media. The KSN model can also be used to describe the activities of organizational knowledge management. The modeling methods of K-K network and KSN are also discussed in the dissertation. To deal with large quantity of documents, a modeling method to document knowledge in organization is proposed based on Word-Relation Network analysis, which can be used to construct K-K network with assistant of computers.2. The weighted network models to organizational knowledge stocks. Based on the K-K network and KSN model, the weighted knowledge network model (WKN) and weighted knowledge supernetwork model are proposed to represent the organizational knowledge stocks. The WKN can represent individual and organizational knowledge stocks. In the WKN model for individual, the weights of nodes donate to what degree the knowledge points are mastered by an individual, while in the WKN model for organization, the weights of nodes have 2 types: one is used to donate the knowledge stocks in individual brains, the other is in material media. In WKSN model, besides the weights of knowledge nodes, the edges from individuals and material media to knowledge nodes also have weights, which donate the stocks that knowledge points are stored in individual brain or material media..3. The method to analyze the knowledge structure of an individual or a group based on WKN model.Based on the WKN model, the methods to represent the domain knowledge, to measure the extensiveness and the intensiveness of the domain knowledge of an individual or a group are presented, and some special features of the interdisciplinary knowledge are also discussed in the dissertation.4. The analyzing & measuring methods to the intelligence loss problem of an organization based on WKSN.The method is focused on the knowledge security in organization caused by the resignation of its members. Firstly the WKSN model is proposed in which all the members and their individual knowledge are integrated together according to the relation mappings between them. Based on the WKSN model, a combined node removal method is proposed. To measure the robustness of knowledge network, some signals such as the unique knowledge proportion, the weighted proportion of unique knowledge, the resilience of knowledge network, the resilience of core field knowledge network, are proposed and analyzed. The method proposed in the dissertation can successfully analyze and measure the robustness of knowledge network, and can also be applied to assess the security of knowledge resource in an organization, to discover the knowledge points that are easy to be lost, ancl to evaluate the importance of each member in the organizational knowledge.5. The method to locating organizational knowledge based on WKSNBased on the WKSN model, a method to searching & locating organizational knowledge is proposed. Firstly the knowledge points to be located can be represented as a subnet of WKN, then all individuals and material storage media that are related to the knowledge points can be retrieved and can be represented as a subnet of WKSN. According to the weighted from the individuals and material storage media to specific knowledge points, the result can be ordered so as to be convenient to locate the organizational knowledge. Noted that the dissertation aims at the methodology of representation and analysis of organizational knowledge instead of the knowledge acquisition methods such as tacit knowledge acquisition or text knowledge acquisition. Additionally, the instance in the dissertation is merely to clarify the processes and characters of the models or methods, therefore some processes such as the acquisition of tacit knowledge and text knowledge are simplified or neglected. The simplifid processes may be enough for research while not for practice. If the methods are going to be applied in practice, some supplementary methods should be taken into account together such as knowledge acquisition methods, knowledge measurement methods, text mining methods, ontology, fields dictionary etc.