Jean-Pierre POITOU

poitou@aixup.univ-aix.fr

The present paper has two main points : the first is to give an anthropological overview of organizational memory –or rather the technological base of the corporation, as well as of the corporate knowledge management ; the second is to draw the implications of this approach for the development of an assistance system to the collective management of knowledge in the firm. The two topics are articulated around the concept of place. This notion, introduced by Pêcheux (1969), is central to both the present author’s sociological conception of knowledge distribution and management within the firm, on the one hand, and to the linguistic fundamentals of the ATELIER FX computer based tool-box on the other hand. According to Pêcheux, formulating as well as understanding a statement or a text, are contingent upon the individuals’ place in the social division of labor. In line with Pêcheux’s work on discourse analysis, it will be argued here, that the exploitation of situated knowledge should rest upon the actor himself. Accordingly, in order to satisfy this requirement, computer assistance to corporate knowledge management should consist neither in formalizing, nor in modeling, but rather in editing knowledge.

In the first part, a conception of knowledge and cognitive functioning will be introduced, germane to the "situativity theories" (Greeno & Moore, 1993), yet more deeply grounded in a sociological (and rather European) tradition. To that end, the notion of "intellectual object" suggested by Janet (1935) is proposed in order to include in an extended concept of documentation, not only verbal statements and graphic documents, but also tools and equipment as well. In the second part, organizational memory is considered in relation with the social division of labor. The concept of place is introduced and its implications exposed with regard to the construction of meaning on the one hand, and to the management of knowledge, individual as well as collective, on the other hand. This latter point is further elaborated in the third part. Two examples of a collective knowledge management system (CKMS) are briefly presented in the fourth part : DIADEME and SG2C. Finally, in the fifth part, ATELIER FX, the computer based tool-box used to implement SG2C is described.

Since the 19th century, the clinical observations of speech troubles associated with brain injuries have supported the stereotype of localization of memories in the brain. A critical reconsideration of theses observations (Rosenfield, 1988) recently confirmed the idea that remembering should not be regarded as the reading of a mental record, but as a cognitive reconstruction of a fact or event, through the examination of its context, as given by external records of various kinds (Halbwachs, 1925, Bartlett, 1932, Connerton, 1989, Middleton & Edwards, 1990). The mental activity of reconstructing facts or events out from the external context, we may call recollection (what Halbwachs calls souvenir or Bartlett remembering), while the term memory will be restricted to the very records or documents in the context - in accordance with the meaning of the term memory in computer science. Memory corresponds to a passive state of the information, while recollection refers to a cognitive activity, a processing of memories. In pretty much the same way, we will contrast knowledge with expertise. In fact, man’s environment is artificial, and is used for recording knowledge. As the psychologist Janet (1935) suggested, man’s environment is made of intellectual objects. Organizational memories can thus be considered as warehouses of intellectual objects, and knowledge management as the management of such storehouses.

Tools are the clearest examples of intellectual objects. A tool is adapted not only to its use, but also to its user. It teaches the individual how to work efficiently. It does also teach him how to cooperate with his fellow workers. This is particularly the case with tools of artificial intelligence, but it holds true for any tool, however unsophisticated : every tool is an artificial thought device.

More precisely, every tool embodies what in ergonomics is known as a model of the user. Whether empirical or scientific, whether implicit or explicit, the user's model is the result of accumulated technological knowledge about the role and efficiency of both the tool and the worker in the production process. In order to be efficient, the worker has to conform to the user's model, inasmuch as he perceives and understands it (of course, the actual user's model does not necessarily coincide with the model which the designer of the tool had in mind.). Once having resolutely admitted the objective character of knowledge, the term document can be given in an extended meaning in order for it to include tools, as well as the organization of the work place, of the shop, of the plant. More generally the organized space (Bolt, 1984) can be considered as the objective form of knowledge.

To distinguish between these two notions whose terms are relatively arbitrary, is helpful, because it draws attention to a third stage, intermediate between the passive state of knowledge, and the active state of expertise. This transition stage of knowledge management consists of skills, a set of mental procedures, enabling the agent to exploit the intellectual objects displayed in the environment, in order to have passive knowledge realized into efficient productive action. Skills, whether social or technical, collective or individual are the basic components of the knowledge management process (Poitou, 1990). They correspond to the agents' ability to actualize, in practice, the knowledge stored in objective form, by adjusting ever more precisely to the actual user's model of the tools and other intellectual objects they are in charge of.

In order to improve the management of knowledge, Engelbart suggested to consider not the individual agent, but a larger system he called "H-LAM/T: Human using Language, Artifacts and Methodology in which he is Trained" (1963, p.40). By proper assistance to the objective part of this system, intelligence could be amplified: "Intelligence amplification seems applicable to our goal [of augmenting the human intellect] in that the entity to be produced will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an unaided human could demonstrate. That which possesses the amplified intelligence is the resulting H—LAM/T system, in which the LAM/T augmentation means represent the amplifier of the individual’s intelligence." (Engelbart, 1963, p. 45). While situated knowledge consists in artifacts, the language and methodology parts of the H-LAM/T system are the constituents of skills. "Language-Artifact-Methodology" is the part of the system where the best can be made of computer assistance. Basically, it means designing methodologies and tools for giving fast, exhaustive and reliable access to accurate and pertinent knowledge, in both its objective (artifacts) and its verbal (language) forms. Or, put otherwise, it means improving the management of documents (in the extended meaning of the term). However, before any attempt at improving the functioning of the H-LAM/T system, the division of labor has to be given consideration.

The development of knowledge and diffusion of expertise are partitioned and segmented in nature. They are segmented in time, according to the ups and downs of competition between firms, between branches within firms, between departments within the branches, and as a function of individual social conflicts and rivalries resulting from competition between members of the work force. They are segmented in space, by the division into departments, each subjected to different, sometimes contradictory industrial policies. And finally, they are hierarchically segmented.

These divisions are a source of conflict due to power relationships between the economic agents, buyers, and sellers of labor. In such a context, pieces of knowledge are elements of professional qualification, and consequently, become bitterly fought-over goods. The outcomes of these conflicts determine the distribution of knowledge in the firms, and, as we shall see later, the absolute non-equivalence of places within the firm.

The current economic conjuncture causes further instability and discontinuity in the generation and use of knowledge in industry. Under these circumstances, the evolution of knowledge and skills is neither linear nor consistent, but dictated by the particular, rarely synchronized patterns of economic expansion, technical change, and product innovation.

The notion of technological base (Poitou,1987) simultaneously refers to the lore of technical knowledge from which agents draw in order to carry out their production practices, and to the heterogeneous collection of pieces of equipment, in which it is embodied: shops, offices, work places and stations, tools and equipment, organizations as well as flow charts, documents and technical instructions.

The ongoing effort to organize production involves ordering and arranging the agent's environment so that it will be as controlled as possible while still being loaded with knowledge. This environment is deliberately pigeonholed with pointers, reminders, landmarks, and signs, which can later be used at low cost. These multiple and redundant cues mark the path for navigation in a controlled and meaningful environment, which might be called a knowledgeable workplace, insofar as it enables mental functioning without an excessive load of representations, for knowledge is already written in the environment. However, while the whole work environment can be considered as a collection of documents, navigation in this sort of hypertext is not equally open to every member of the firm. Neither the understanding of the knowledge embodied in work artifacts, nor the mutual understanding among fellow-workers are independent from the places of the agents in the network of social relationships woven through the division of labor. Actually, what sense is made out of knowledge situated at a given location is dependent upon who is trying to access it, or rather upon his place in the social division of labor. Before considering the collective management at the level of the technological base, we shall thus first examine the concept of place, and its implications for the meaning of "documents".

The term "place" is used in its topographical sense, of course, as the physical work place, and in its cognitive sense, as a situation for the storage of knowledge. "A place" should also be understood in a social sense, as a position in the social relationships of production, indicated by wages, job assignment, qualification and skill requirements. The fundamental relationships between the instrument and the performer (Poitou, 1978) and between the instrument and the knowledge (Pêcheux & Fuchs,1975) are nested in the network of place relationships. Thus, the relationships between places determine the possibility for the performer of a task to capture the knowledge embodied in the environment, in order to actualize it as expertise, i.e. to perform the task.

In developing his automatic discourse analysis program (A.A.D.), Pêcheux (1969) argued that every text or discourse could be understood as a selection of elements among an higher-level master discourse, which in turn could be viewed as a virtual hypertext, where parts are linked together and serve each other as references or rather as paraphrases. Understanding means thus navigating through this hypertext and using the associated discourses, or co-text, in order to enlighten the text actually read or heard. Enunciating a discourse also requires a navigation through the master discourse, in order to organize a selection of subparts.

Pêcheux further stated that the selection of the constituents of the master discourse, the linkage of its subparts, and the availability of the paths are ruled by the social conditions of discourse production, i.e. the socio-economical conjuncture and the social relations between speakers or writers, and recipients. Thus navigation through the master discourse is determined by:

(1) Morpho-syntactic markers : the linguistic cues serve as shifters from node to node. What is said in a document is understood through the way it is told or written. Not only the vocabulary, but the argumentative style, the grammar, the enunciation marks also serve to build meaning, by indicating how to navigate within the text, and between the text and its co-texts. Linguistic characterization of the text, using lexical and morpho-syntactic markers can be used to trace and assess relationships between different parts of the same text, and among texts between documents (Pêcheux, 1969, Stiegler, 1993).

(2) Organizational cues, which help to identify places : knowing where from, that is from which place a speech or text comes, also matters in understanding (Pêcheux & Fuchs,1975). Organizations are usually careful in making clear who addresses whom, and what the respective positions in the corporate structure are. Organizational indices concern the authorities (in terms of department, offices, positions) and agencies which issued the document, the people to whom it was directly and/or indirectly addressed, the specific functions the document fulfills in the organization (whether it is a memo, an agreement, a bill...). Industrial writings contain a great many markers of this sort, which are evidence of the fact that the construction of meaning by both the writer and the readers is heavily dependent on these organizational cues.

(3) Relationships between places. By selecting texts in the domains of the master discourse they have access to, speakers build a text relevant to the present and local conditions at their place. Readers take advantage of the various linguistic and organizational cues in order to identify the functional and social relationships between places, and to select accordingly in the domains of the master discourse they can access, the paraphrases relevant to the text. Comparing the text to its paraphrase allows to dispose of ambiguity.

In-house training, and more generally methods for the description of knowledge contribute to knowledge capitalization, and to the development of a shared corporate culture. In turn, sharing a common technical culture makes the description of activities and the elicitation of knowledge easier. The objective foundation of the corporate culture is the technological base, that is equipment as situated knowledge. As already stressed in the foregoing sections, access to the technological base is unequal. Some domains are more specific to certain shops and offices, while others are common to all the departments of the firm. However, as the actual instrument for cooperation, the technological base constitutes the deposit of a lore common to all members of the organization. Descriptions of knowledge are marked by idiolects, some specific to the whole organization, which they serve to differentiate from the outside, others only to some departments. In-house parlance is the vernacular which makes it possible to members of the organization to overcome misunderstanding. Idioms are markers useful for referring statements to their conditions of production. They point to the section of the organization where a statement comes from, and thus to the context from where to extract meaning.

DIADEME, is a computer assisted system for the capitalization and the management of research engineers' knowledge, designed, developed and implemented at EDF by Ballay. Considering that Poitou’s conception of a system for the management of collective knowledge (CKMS) was quite germane to the rationale and the general outline of DIADEME, Ballay associated the present author to his project.

During Spring 1995, the present author conducted at EDF a survey of the engineers' knowledge management behavior, of their attitudes toward a prospective CKMS, and the next year, a survey among the same engineers about their users' reactions to the implementation of DIADEME. Both studies, as well as reports from further users, have confirmed that DIADEME meets expectations. Actually, the system is being extended outside the department where it was originated. However, TOPIC, the full text indexing and information tool does not absolutely preclude external intervention in the description of knowledge. Actually, at least in the so-called "concept" mode of request, it requires knowledge modeling. As argued in the foregoing sections, this might not be without disadvantages, which a tool like NOMINO, to be presented later, might hopefully help to circumvent.

In order to display a complete description of the technological base, the existing verbal documentation usually has to be supplemented by further descriptions of the objective knowledge and of its location in the organizational structure. This has to be done within the "place" relationships, by the performers themselves. As already noticed, members of the firm know how to explain a job, what has to be known in order to perform it, where lies the information, what are the decisive cues for appropriate action. Furthermore, they are familiar with the local idiolects, which provide the bests cues for locating situated knowledge. The methods thus used by the personnel for transmitting and eliciting knowledge should be observed and recorded, in order to document the technological base.

To that end, we are currently developing a method for the "Autonomous Analysis of Activities (Method 3A, Poitou, 1991) which offers members of the personnel a procedure for describing their own activities, in line with the self-confrontation methods initiated by Von Cranach & Harré (1982). Our method is based upon a trainer/trainee relation; it requires the participation of three persons: an expert, whose activity is to be described, an "observer-trainee", and a naive trainee.

In order to analyze the knowledge underlying or inherent to the activity of a given expert, at his work place, the first step is to select an "observer-trainee". Performing a different task in the same office or shop would qualify a person for that role. It will permit enough familiarity with the job situation for basic understanding, while carrying enough uncertainty for accurate and relevant questioning about the particulars of the task to be described. The selected observer is then introduced to the observation and interviewing techniques of the Method 3A.

Observers must first observe and record the behavior of their "instructor", i.e. their fellow worker in charge of the job to be analyzed. They will observe and question their trainer up to the point where they will be able to actually perform the task. The correct performance of the job by the trainees evidences that knowledge has been efficiently described in terms and statements clear enough for any member of the firm. Observer-trainees must further write down a notice of instruction about the job, technique or device they had to master. This verbal record of knowledge is then read by the second trainee, completely new to the job. When he can perform the job to the satisfaction of the expert, then the recording of knowledge is considered to be valid. Not only the device is correctly described, but the modus operandi is accurately recorded. Otherwise, the instruction notice is improved, and the validation procedure iterated until a correct performance is obtained from the naive trainee. On the basis of these purely empirical tests, it can be assumed that knowledge has been converted from its objective into its verbal form, accurately and completely. Such record increments the corpus of descriptions of the technological base. We can now turn our attention to the task of editing knowledge, whether available in documents, or through descriptions by the Method 3A.

Documents only become completely comprehensible if they are related to the work situations and operations to which they refer. The link has to be created between the organization and technical operation of the company on the one hand, and the descriptions of the in-house technical practices, on the other hand.

Existing documents are registered according to the usual rules of the documentation service, and indexed with respect to their organizational markers. The writing of new documents is computerized, and structured according to norms aimed at making their electronic edition and circulation as easy as possible. The record of each document in the inventory file includes, in addition to the usual archive indexes, complete references about : its origin, authors, addressees direct or lateral; its history (i.e. which documents have preceded, which it modifies); the data it refers to; the concepts it refers to. Documents are processed in order to select data and concepts they contain. It should be noted that the whole document is processed, including not only the text itself, but also the identification marks it bears (such as name of the authors and addressees, departments which released it, and so on). Excerpts are fed into the records of the relevant entries in the data file and in the notional file.

The notional file is an in-house dictionary of corporate knowledge. Entries in this file are noun phrases parsed out from the firm documents. Under the heading of a noun phrase, there are : a definition made of the relevant excerpts, which allow for the construction of a concept of the heading; a list of related notions, i.e. other noun phrases co-occurring in some excerpt with the entry of the record; a list of "see also" or associated notions. Associated notions are the results of "navigation" in the file. A record is kept of the consultations made in the file. When, even through sheer "mental association", several notional entries are "browsed through", they are said to be associated. Of course, every excerpt quoted in a notional record is given with the references to the document it comes from. Updating the files is exclusively additive: deleting a previously recorded excerpt is strictly forbidden. The purpose of this rule is to make sure that every change in thinking, doctrine, or usage affecting in-house knowledge is recorded.

The descriptions that occur in the files are not the outcome of the file-entry writer's analysis or representation of what is written in the main documents. The descriptions are collections of excerpts taken from the main documents processed. This procedure makes it possible to avoid introducing into the texts any special vocabulary other than that found in the technological base under study (i.e. the lexicon of the parlance common to the members of the company); guarantees the local and historical validity of the definitions; preserves the significant idiosyncrasies of the company members' own syntax.

An item's description thus provides a means for linking together the various pieces of information about that item, while preserving the particularities or even contradictions among the agents who employ it and were consulted on the matter. This is possible only if the system provides an hypertext browsing system built automatically.

Earlier in this paper was presented the concept of place, which is central in our conception of a CKMS. The concept comes from the work of Pêcheux (1969) concerned with the early development of a program for discourse analysis. Pêcheux’s ideas have also been seminal in the research conducted at the Center for computer aided text analysis (Centre ATO) at the University of Quebec in Montreal, where NOMINO and ATELIER FX have been developed (Dumas, et.al. 1995,Plante, 1995, Plante & Dumas, 1995). It is thus perfectly understandable that both approaches meet in an effort to apprehend knowledge through the examination of its support and vehicle.

Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, .

Bolt, R. (1984) The Human interface. Where people and computers meet. Belmont, Lifetime Learning Publications.

Bonnet, A., Haton, J.P., Truong-Ngoc, J.M. (1986). Systèmes experts, vers la maîtrise technique. Paris: Inter Editions. .

Connerton, P. (1989) How societies remember. Cambridge, Cambridge,University Press.

Dumas, L., Plante, A., Plante, P. (1995) Nomino ; Version 1.0b. (Tech. Rep.). Montreal: Centre d'Analyse de Texte par ordinateur ATO, University of Quebec at Montreal.

Engelbart, D. (1963) A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect. in P. Howerton, (ed.)Vistas in Information Handling Vol.1. Spartan books, Washington, DC, 1-29.reproduit in GREIF, I (Ed.) Computer-supported cooperative work : a book of readings. San Mateo, Californie, Morgan Kaufmann, 1988.

Gibson, J, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Greeno, J.G., Moore, J.L. (1993) Situativity and symbols: response to Vera and Simon. Cognitive Science. 17, 1, 49-59.

Halbwachs, M. (1925) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris, Alcan.

Janet, P.,(1935) Les débuts de l’intelligence. Paris, Flammarion.

Middleton, D., Edwards, D. (Eds.) (1990) Collective remembering. London, Sage.

Pêcheux, M. (1969). Analyse automatique du discours. Paris, Dunod.

Pêcheux, M., & Fuchs, C. (1975). Mises au point et perspectives à propos de l'analyse automatique du discours in M.Pêcheux (Ed.) "analyse du discours. Langue et idéologies". Langages, 37, 7-80.

Plante, P. (1995) NOMINO [Computer program]. Montreal: Centre d'Analyse de Texte par ordinateur ATO, University of Quebec at Montreal.

Plante, P. Dumas, L. (1995) Nomino-signet - un assistant à la construction de bases de connaissances sur les textes. (Tech. Rep.). Montreal: Centre d'Analyse de Texte par ordinateur ATO, University of Quebec at Montreal.

Poitou, J.P. (1978). La dynamique des groupes, une idéologie au travail. Paris, CNRS.

Poitou, J.P. (1983). Savoir vif, savoir mort. Paper presented at the Symposium "Les cultures populaires" of the Société Française de Sociologie and the Société d'Ethnologie Française, Nantes.

Poitou, J.P. (1987). The expert and the system. ORIA 87. Artificial Intelligence and Sea(pp. E1-E12). IIRIAM, Marseille

Poitou, J.P. (1991). Définition d'une méthodologie de recueil et d'extraction des connaissances au service des systèmes experts en amont de la formalisation des connaissances. (Research rep. n° 89 D0041) Paris: Ministère de la Recherche et de la Technologie.

Stiegler, B. (1993). Projet OPEN. In J.-P Barthès (Ed.). Proceedings of the Symposium COMETT 93 Gestion du savoir-faire et des connaissances de l’entreprise. Problématique, modélisation ; intérêt et limites de l’approche "objet". Compiègne, Institut International pour l’Intelligence Artificielle.

Rosenfield, I. (1988) The invention of memory, a new view of the brain. New York, Basic Books, Trad. française L’invention de la mémoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1994.

Von Cranach, M., Harré, R.( 1982) The analysis of action. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.