Exploiting Reusable Abstractions in Organizational Inquiry

Abstract

This chapter shows how crucial aspects of organizational knowledge and organizational inquiry can be exactified using a relatively small number of abstract concepts common to various areas of human endeavor, such as (exact) philosophy, business management, science, and technology. Abstraction and exactification are essential for taming complexity in general and complexity of the modern-day organization in particular. Exactification is achieved, first and foremost, by creating and using ontologies—business and organizational domain models with precisely defined semantics. An ontology clearly demonstrates the fundamental concepts of a domain and relationships between them. The semantics of generic concepts used in effective modeling is based on mathematics and philosophy, while in too many cases a multitude of concepts invented in buzzword-compliant IT methods has no clear semantics and therefore cannot be reasonably used. Organizational learning and organizational inquiry can be understood and accomplished substantially better in the well-defined contexts of the domain ontologies that provide a foundation of organizational knowledge.

Disciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in the Study of Knowledge

“…30-31) by using the term to describe the knowledge employees in organizations have in their heads that can lead to product improvements, if only it can be transformed into explicit knowledge. The concept of tacit knowledge is used in business modeling to develop ontologies composed of precise terms "exactifying" and summarizing conceptual schemas underlying the tacit assumptions of organization members with different viewpoints (Kilov & Sack, 2005). KM, therefore, is the toolbox of techniques intended to maximize the value and impact of employees' knowledge by converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, thereby making it actionable.…”