Management support systems: Towards integrated knowledge management

Abstract

Humans do not apply formalistic scaffolds of fixed rules of ‘knowledge’ to integrate the a priori given objective world of data ‘out there’: they do not compute the world. Regardless of some ‘knowledge’-modeling assumptions, just the opposite is true: humans use their subjectively perceived world of turbulent circumstances to bring forth (create, recreate and adapt), again and again, knowledge as an autopoietic network of relations through which they coordinate their actions. Such knowledge brings (through language) coherence and coordination to the otherwise turbulent and chaotic world of human action. Knowledge is not ‘processing of information’ but a coordination of action. As a consequence, any management support system (DSS, AI, ES, etc.) claiming knowledge as its purpose or its base, cannot be of the symbolic computation type à la Simon. © Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland).