Week 8

Question 1: How can managers encourage an open sharing of ideas, problems and solutions?

(Student note: Wasn’t this question already covered in an earlier assignment?)

One of the largest vectors to foster an environment that encourages sharing ideas,

problems, and solutions is to maintain a strong open-door policy. For example, I was previously

employed by Bosch Service Solutions in Berlin, Germany, and they had an instituted open-door

policy in which employees on a bi-weekly basis were summoned to meet with the human

resource manager as well as the project manager and occasionally another member of upper

management to discuss any concerns or issues with the current workflow. We were permitted to

voice opinions, ask questions, and give suggestions or ideas on how to improve the workflow

process.

By instituting such a policy, this not only gave employees a voice and the assurance that

their input was valued, but it also promoted transparency in the organization—our questions

allowed us to understand the intrinsic constituents of the functioning system as opposed to

working on terms of “That’s just the way it is!”. Furthermore, because our ideas and suggestions

were considered, we experienced several instances in which alternative software (such as

utilizing a different vendor for our virtual machine system) and implementing a pseudo-chatroom

using the workforce based solution called “Slack” to stay in contact with co-workers without

needing to share private information such as personal mobile numbers helped streamline our

working process.

Another caveat to regard carefully is cross-skilling—this is the ability to blend personnel

with different areas of expertise to solve problems as opposed to simply focusing on the relevant
department to create a solution. For example, if a project is experiencing significant latency while

using a specific software application to complete their tasks, instead of asking for the department

to find a solution to work more efficiently, it would be prudent to employ the help of a software

developer from the IT department to either investigate the issue or even develop a more direct

and streamlined application that would help the personnel accomplish the same tasks in half the

amount of time. Referring to my previous example of my employer Bosch Service Solutions, we

had an in-house IT team who were also tasked with custom software development, and they once

created a custom softphone telephony application that was tailored to balance and handle our load

of incoming calls.

By implementing these types of management techniques, important precepts such as

critical thinking, problem solving skills, and creativity is inspired within all participants of the

project.
Question 3: Creation, transfer, and integration of knowledge require several determining

factors. How would you monitor the presence of these factors to ensure that knowledge in your

area of the organization was created, transferred, and integrated as appropriate?

I would say that it would be important to first and foremost keep track of techniques as

well as new algorithms in the process of creating knowledge and to apply them to instituted

benchmarks and methods so as to ascertain that key performance indicators will be met upon

implementation. Furthermore, it would also be a prudent move to develop metrics that indicate

the number of new information or algorithms discovered over a given period of time. Peer

reviews and feedback are also crucial during the creation process as well as testing. This is to

ascertain that the new knowledge is accurate, relevant, and effective.

Transferring knowledge can be monitored by means of engineering sharing sessions

where team members can transfer knowledge that is specialized and/or nuanced. Something I

recall an employer doing is routinely quizzing employees to gauge their level of knowledge and

efficiency with a new technology; the same principle can be applied with knowledge transfer.

Quizzing or surveying team members to gauge how much information they are particularly

absorbing and how comfortable they feel with it would also be a recommended practice.

As the knowledge base is implemented, analysis should be kept on how often it is actually

used and how often it used across different teams and departments to measure its efficiency and

determined if fine tuning is needed or otherwise if further information needs to be gathered and

created for additional entries to the knowledge base. Information assisting in this analysis can be

the length of time that was taken to resolve an issue by using the knowledge base and the ratio of

successful resolutions based on the knowledge bank versus to number of escalations to more
skilled staff in the instances which the information provided was insufficient or inaccurate or if

the team member was not able to use the database efficiently (pointing again to the need for

proper training).

As in all cases, feedback is the most crucial in the implementation of the knowledge base

so as to focus on its strengths and weaknesses.

Question 4: If you were charged with developing the specifications for a knowledge-

management system in your organization, what key information would you need and how

would you go about gathering and organizing it?

It is important to understand that a knowledge-management system is a multi-faceted

asset that requires exploring both technical and human elemental components before engineering

it into one aggregate machine. The best approach is to treat it in the same manner as you would a

project by developing a clear outline that defines a scope and explains the objectives of the

system—the center focus being what is intended to be managed so as to materialize a structure of

the system. In alignment with this, the content type should also be thoroughly discussed.

Obviously, we will want to identify key stakeholders who will be using the systems and

the degree of influence it would have on streamlining the work process, and similarly we will

need to gather user requirements for these stakeholders for concerns such at security measures or

access control and tagging. Similarly, we should also ascertain accessibility issues to solidify

when, where, and how the knowledge system can be accessed, which should include mobile

access and possible remote access.

If there is an existing system in place, it should be evaluated for ease of integration or

otherwise replacing the system entirely should be a possibility. Finally, content verification is also

a strong key component for a knowledge-management system—this is to include identifying

information that is obsolete, inaccurate, duplicated, or has been amended.

I think volume and scalability should further be a key point to identify, particularly as the

business grows. This is to estimate the potential size of the data to be managed, its rate of growth,

and the amount of probable latency experienced when searching the database at a large size. This
is where proper networking equipment as well as appropriate data structures algorithms are of

serious importance. Since a need for equipment upgrades, more expensive enterprise level

software or additional funding for in-house programmers could potentially become a realistic

concern, proper budgeting is definitely paramount during this phase.

Gathering this information will require a bit of effort, as research will need to be

completed for an asset that is as complex as a knowledge-management system. This will need to

include interviewing stakeholders to ascertain what manner of information they are usually

finding themselves lacking and evaluating the current system and/or technologies they are

currently implementing as well as reviewing the relevant documentation to analyze its

capabilities and weaknesses. Measuring benchmarks of the current systems and technologies to

determine what needs to be improved would also be highly advisable.

I would also find it a very prudent move to consult with professionals who are experts on

the nature of the field of knowledge to be managed in order to obtain advice on what the

knowledge management system should contain and how it should be categorized for each

department and/or team.

Question 5: How would you describe the drivers of the next wave of technological change?

Without a hesitation, I can confidently say that artificial intelligence is one of the main

drivers of technological change. Today’s algorithmic models can be fine tuned to predict future

threats based on the analysis of data provided to them, which helps streamline security protocols

and helps with reactive as well as pre-emptive measures. For the context of my own occupation,

this means that artificial intelligence will allow me to recommend what specific preventative

measures to take, as opposed to waiting for an attack to happen, and it further allows me to

determine which systems would most likely be targeted—allowing for the client to implement

improved resource distribution.

There are challenges (as expected of using any form of technology)—the two most

outstanding ones in my opinion are the quality of the data that the artificial intelligence models

are trained on and the possibility of false positives. In regard to the former, the particular

challenge in this instance is the fact that the predictive model is only as valuable as the data it has

been trained on as well as the degree of comprehensiveness that the model itself has been trained.

Supplying insufficient levels of data, data that has not been properly cleansed, or data with

excessive anomalies will create unpredictable algorithms that will not recognize actual attacks or

falsely identify an activity as an attack (which bring us to our latter challenge).

False positives can interrupt workflow by raising security alerts, and they can also flag an

innocent user as being suspicious—thereby costing the business unnecessary time and money to

investigate. For a more simplified example of the devastation of this, we can consider an incident

in which a Google user took a photograph of a newborn child in her “natural form.” Because the

OS on her phone was Android (a Google product), the algorithm employed by Google mistakenly
believed it to be child sexual abuse material and promptly suspended her entire Google account—

which her business had been aggregately based on with Google’s services such as mail, calendar,

contacts, web hosting, cloud files, and video conferencing. It was several weeks before Google

officials accepted her appeal and reinstated her account; by this time, serious damage had been

done to her business since she had no feasible way to contact her business associates or suppliers,

or to fulfill her orders. This highlights the importance of employing models that have been

thoroughly trained and supplying the model with sufficient data to avoid false positives.

Another driver of technological change is a persistent demand for advanced

communication technologies. Research has estimated that 50 billion devices will be dependent on

industrial level Internet of Things by the year 2025(Corbo et al, n.d.). Furthermore, digital

communication technology has advanced to 5G mobile networks, which provides more

bandwidth to streamline cloud services and streaming applications, reduced latency to make real

time communication and remote control more efficient and promotes mass connectivity—an

element that is crucial for IoT networks and ecosystems.

The concerns that this driver would face are primarily security concerns. Introducing new

technologies definitively also means introducing new potential vulnerabilities. Adding to this

issue is the fact that 5G networks are very complex, which exponentially amplifies the risk of

security weak spots. Exacerbating this problem is 5G’s ability to divide networks in order to

permit specified resource allocation—therefore creating additional complexity within the network

and creating yet more security concerns. Another glaring issue is the fact that IoT networks will

have several different types of devices connected to it, each device with its own potential

vulnerabilities. In simpler expressions, an Android device may strongly guard point A while not

realizing a potential weakness with point B; an Apple device may strongly guard points A and B
but not realize a serious problem with point D. This makes security become much more

complicated, as businesses will need to employ multiple security and programming experts who

are well versed in various types of operating systems and firmware. Imaginably, this would

seriously increase the costs of operation.

References:

Corbo, Jacomo et al, “The top trends in tech”, no date of publication listed,

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-top-trends-in-tech-2021