MIS Week 6: Managing Knowledge in Organisations

Knowledge Management - How Do Organisations Learn?How Manage Knowledge with IT

Learning Outcomes for Session 6

1. What is Knowledge? and Where is knowledge in organisations?
2. How do organisations learn? and The dominant perspectives of knowledge, KM
3. What is the difference between individual learning and organisational learning?

Handout

1. Knowledge Management Handout

Supporting Resources

1. Codification or Personalisation – What is your firm’s KM strategy?

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How do organisations learn?

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MIS Week 11: Defining Development… and the role of ICTs

• Download Defining Development Handout     
• Mobile Health Powerpoint
• Mobile Health Case Study
• Mobile Health in Uganda Video Case Study Report – http://tinyurl.com/applabuganda

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Development is simply defined as ”good change”. Briefly discuss what you understand by good change and how can we use information and communication technologies to achieve it.

• Explain good change – as progress towards a desired state
• Good change lies on a continuum and development is a process not a definite goal post
• Conclude on the fact that development is an encompassing change and has winners and losers
• ICT4D projects should consider the unintended consequences of the projects and not only on the intended objectives

 As change is a process, this definition of development tends to denote a process towards a desirable state in society. Whether this state is achieved in the short or long term, change has several implications for society. Disruption may occur in the established patterns of living within the society as it moves towards good change, and thus reflect a contradiction to its intended meaning, and generate a discourse on what constitutes this ‘good change’. As a result, the term development in both academic and non-academic fields has enjoyed an ambiguous position of being alluded to a diversity of meanings defining or evaluating what ‘good change’ is, and who this good change belongs to.  In addressing these gaps, Amartya Sen’s work on capabilities and functionings has been the major influence since the human perspective of development began in the mid-1980s. Sen argued that in defining good change what really mattered to both the poor and non-poor person was the “capability to function”, and “that poverty cannot be properly measured by income or even by utility as conventionally understood; what matters is not the things a person has – or the feelings these provide – but what a person is or can be and does or can do. What matters for well-being is not just the characteristics of commodities consumed, as in the utility approach, but what use the consumer can and does make of commodities.

By this argument, Sen urges the development discourse into considering that the concept of achieving good change or human well-being goes beyond just providing commodities and their use to considering their functionings; that is, “what a person does with the commodities of given characteristics that they come to possess or control (or can do with them)” . The ability to carry out this functioning is defined by the capabilities of the person. Since one may have different abilities – capabilities in Sen’s perspective – what characterises development is “the freedom that a person has in terms of the choice of functionings, given his personal features (conversion of characteristics into functionings) and his command over commodities….”. Hence, if what really matters in achieving good change centres on the “capability to function”, then development within this perspective is about “enabling”, particularly, “the enlargement of people choices” of functioning in society.

Case Studies on Climate change and ICTs

Climate change and ICTs involve the use of ICTs to mitigate, prevent and/or manage the effects of human and non-human activities on the environment and change in the climate in a region over a period. Case studies on various areas of ICTs, climate change and development are presented here.  Each one follows a consistent format, outlining the nature of the ICT application, the drivers and objectives behind the case, its stakeholders, an evaluation of cost/benefit and success/failure, analysis of key enablers and challenges, and a summary set of lessons learned and recommendations.

A1. Pakreport: Crowdsourcing for Multipurpose and Multicategory Climate-Related Disaster Reporting

A2. Role of ICTs in Early Warning of Climate-Related Disasters: A Sri Lankan Case Study

A3. Using Mobile Phones to Reduce the Adversities of Climate Change in Rural Nepal

These cases studies are from the University of Manchester Climate Change Research Group in the School of Environment and Development - http://www.niccd.org/

The Prosumer – Segmentation and Differentiation in today’s market

This session of e-marketing explores the concept of the prosumer or the new kind of consumer.

¨A typical one-hour adventure in the life of a 25-year-old professional male, Justin:

• Tunes his iPod to the latest BBC podcast while his TV is tuned to a soccer game and his cell phone and PC are within reach.
• Picks up his computer to find a blog mentioned during the podcast, sees a video on the blog, and texts a friend about the video.
• Justin searches for the video title on Google and finds a job posting on Vimeo, an online video-posting site.
• He posts a link to the video and Vimeo site on his Twitter stream.
• Justin is the new consumer: a multitasker interested in the social media.

¨How can a marketer capture dollars from these behaviors?

Download Session Materials

1. Prosumer Slides
2. Prosumer Notes
3. Ecommerce in Ghana