Introduction:

You are required to produce an academic report of between 3,000 and 3,500 words, excluding appendices and references. The report should use appropriate concepts taken from the Knowledge Management module to provide critical appraisal of one of the following.

- The organisation, or part of the organisation, or a project or situation at your current place of work.
- The organisation, or part of the organisation, or a project or situation at a previous workplace of yours.
- The organisation, or part of the organisation, or a project or situation at a workplace where you are not working and have not worked previously, but to which you have suitable access for this assessment.

Task

You may choose to approach this assessment in a variety of ways. For example, you might want to focus on issues in the organisation or challenges faced by organisations in starting KM initiatives, which could be resolved with appropriate process improvement or support people learning with the involvement of technology based tools like intranet portals, groupware, data mining and so on in knowledge management and take an overall overview of knowledge management as a whole. For this you could consider using a research tool to support like an information management questionnaire. You might alternatively choose to focus on one aspect of knowledge management, such as
- Knowledge capturing and creation
- knowledge sharing and dissemination or
- knowledge acquisition and application

and use this as your basis for analysis. You may want to study the application of a framework as a solution and provide the necessary research study towards the same.

Additionally you would also need to provide the supporting link between systems thinking and knowledge management.

You must provide an appropriate background of the concepts of knowledge management, using literature in the proper manner, with accurate and complete references. You should provide a brief description of the situation you will be using for your critical appraisal.

These are both necessary conditions but are not sufficient. You must then link the concepts to the situation you are appraising and use the concepts to provide the appropriate appraisal.

Appropriate research methods could be employed leading towards recommendations and conclusions. Whatever you choose, you must justify your choices.

The options above give scope for a great variety of responses. Given that, it would be extremely odd if two people happened to produce similar reports and any such similarities would be fairly easy to detect. An appropriate penalty would be applied under such circumstances.

You will have demonstrated ability to:

1. Identify and present the issues/challenges within the context of the assigned task and from this demonstrate a logical structure and layout of the organization.

2. Apply research skills to examine and demonstrate knowledge of analyzing organisational information and of the literature relevant to the issues of knowledge management system.

3. Critically appraise and present the situation under consideration using any concept of KM or KM as a whole and be able to bring out management issues with respect to people/technology/process or all. Provide the necessary recommendations or conclusions based on your analysis of the case situation.

4. Correctly reference all published material included in the paper.

- Evaluate critically using the different approaches and the concepts of KM on a substantial case study using systems ideas with respect to knowledge management.

Presentations

Each presentation will last no longer than 5-7 minutes and should focus on evaluation of criteria 1 and 3. Students should be able to present their analysis in a professional manner and must submit soft and hard copies of their presentations (time of presentation to be confirmed later). Dates are tentative and will be confirmed.