Abstract

Organizational learning means an effective knowledge management. Management is nothing more than the constant decision-making. Therefore organizational learning must be seen through the prism of decisions taken at all levels. Unfortunately decisions are never taken within comfortable conditions. Decision maker suffers from a lack of any support. There is often a problem with human resources having right skills, sometimes they do not have adequate knowledge, therefore appropriate analysis cannot be done. Dedicated tools become the answer to such problems - the so-called expert systems. The expert systems are the technology able to store and process specialized knowledge on a specific area of human activity. They can be called substitute for a human expert decision-maker, able to provide consultancy as a result of reasoning from knowledge base. The process of building expert systems requires key position – Knowledge Engineer. This is the person who is responsible for extracting facts or rules from domain experts, and must record it a formal way, appropriate to the chosen technology. Therefore the Knowledge Engineer has always been considered as technical position, specialized IT professional. Only technical universities and faculties offered education programs for them. Such approach is still valid, but times have changed. Author claims, according to his experience gained during several projects, that nowadays organizations’ knowledge management problems are more complex and have different nature than before – they are more qualitive than quantitive. Big number of decisions is being taken basing on uncertain or incomplete knowledge. Hence, the Knowledge Engineer should be today rather interdisciplinary specialist – with some psychology, management or law background than only technician. The paper describes the concept of educating Knowledge Engineers on Faculty of Management and Economics – the most humanistic faculty at Gdansk University of Technology.

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