Knowledge “Acts”

                  Shared meanings and purposes as well as newknowledge and capabilities, converge on decision making as the activity leading to the selection and initiation of action.Shared meanings, agendas, and identities select the premises, rules, and routines that structure decision making. New knowledge and capabilities make possible new alternatives and outcomes, expanding the range of available organizational responses [Choo, C., 2002, p. 86]. Choo further proposes that information flows are a central process that bridges knowledge creation and decision making activity. Information flows continuously between sense making, knowledge creating, and decision making, so that the outcome of information use in one mode provides the elaborated context and the expanded resources for information use in the other modes [Choo, C., 2002, p. 85].


                       Information used in one activity that results in new knowledge will, in turn, be used to guide selection of alternatives in future tasks that involve decision making. Codified rules and routines would be relied on to support evaluation of alternatives and selection of action decisions. Choice of alternatives, and decision outcomes then provide the backdrop upon which sense making, or justification, of decision rationale occurs. Such decision rationale, and its associated sense making can then be codified for (re)use in other contexts, applied to future activities that draw on it to create new instances of knowledge.

                     In such decision oriented activity, we have proposed that “what-if ” questions are the dominant type of speech act performed.Support for such scenario predicting questions will demand rich context upon which to apply knowledge of the past and the present to bear on the problem or situation at
hand.We would like to refocus the discussion of knowledge management strategy to the demands of complex, dynamic, contextual, and emergent decision processes. The next section of the paper gives an overview of knowledge management processes, procedures, and practices. Chapter 8 discusses how they are related to decision making.