Assessment item - Knowledge Management Fundamentals

Objective

A key understanding within Knowledge Management (KM) is to be able to define and differentiate between data, information and knowledge. This assignment will help the students to understand the differences among knowledge, data, and information, different types of knowledge, recognise one of the locations of knowledge i.e. community of practice, and one of the foundations of KM solutions i.e. KM Infrastructure. 

As part of this assignment you are to answer the following four questions. First two questions are based on the contents of the Chapter 2 (The Nature of Knowledge) and rest of the questions are based on the contents of the Chapter 3 (Knowledge Management Foundations:

Infrastructure, Mechanisms, and Technologies) of the prescribed textbook.  

Question 1 - Explain why the same set of data can be considered as useful information by some and useless data by others. Further, could this useful information be termed as "knowledge"? Why? 

Question 2 - You are considering buying a new Holden Commodore. Gather tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge on buying Holden Commodorecars from various resources: e.g., the Holden Web site, your friends etc. List your findings and explain what source of knowledge (tacit or explicit) is important for your choice.  

Question 3 - State the roles of (a) organisational culture and (b) organisational structure for the development of a good Knowledge Management (KM) infrastructure.

Question 4 - Define a "Community of Practice (CoP)". Determine ways in which a local hospital would benefit from CoP. Conduct interviews if necessary. 

Presentation of your assignment (Hints):

• Title Page - clearly setting out the title of your assessment, your name, your student ID, the unit name, unit code and the name of the lecturer. There must be no graphics or pictures of any kind on the title page.
• Format - submit one file in MS Word .doc or .docx format, Times New Roman (TNR) 12pt. The report must have a header and footer as follows: in the header put your student number on the left side of the page and your name on the right side of the page. The footer should have a page number that is centred on the page. The header and footer should appear beginning with the 'Body' of the report and continue throughout the rest of the report. There should be no header or footer on the 'Title page' or the 'Table of Contents'.
• No need to provide 'executive summary'.
• Table of Contents - auto generated using the word processor. The title page and table of contents itself should not appear in the table of contents. The table of contents should be on its own page.
• Body - this is where you discuss your answers in detail, where appropriate, headings and sub-headings should be included with the logical progression of your answers from one idea to the next. Do not use the word 'Body' as a heading - identify words that relate to your report for the heading.
• References - this is a list of all the books and articles you have cited in your assessment. Use Harvard (author-date) referencing style for your in-text citations as well as your list of references. In this assessment, you should aim to make use of recent primary academic journal articles and the Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Rajiv Sabherwal (2015) textbook. For each of your answers, use at least two academic references (journal, conference or edited book chapter papers etc.) those are published between 2010 and 2017. Contact your library for assistance in proper referencing. Use of Wikipedia and other similar websites is strictly discouraged.