Management Science
MACRAME: a modelling methodology in multiactor contexts
Decision Support Systems - Special issue: DSS on model formulation
Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective
Organization Science
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When facing decisional problems in a public domain, the organization players often have a specific knowledge of their area of work and most of the time this know-how is neither recognized nor mapped for future utilization. In many situations, the good practice of knowledge documentation or experience collection through pre-established rules are not taken into due account; knowledge transfer is not always a priority for organizations. When the need to record and track the point of view of the actors in organization processes becomes a key point for the decisional structure, a methodology to easily and transparently produce a map of the situation is not available. The presented work concerns the acquisition and use of organizational knowledge in a multi actor public context, the university sector, in relation to a radical change called the “Bologna Process”. The aim of the work was to understand students' perception of the new courses supplied by an engineering faculty and to structure a set of organized and useable information elements pertaining to the main problematic areas, from the students' point of view. Free interviews appeared to be the most effective and easiest way of gathering the needed information elements, but the organization of these interviews and the treatment of all the acquired information elements required the activation of a planned and transparent procedure. The aim of this paper is to propose a methodological answer to the problem of acquiring, analysing, structuring and presenting knowledge and information obtained from a set of free interviews by demonstrating a case study. With the proposed cognitive mapping approach, it was possible validate, synthesize and visualize what emerged during the interviews. Moreover, when suggestions on a specific subject were made, the methodology allowed them to be collected, organized and reported to the diverse decisional structure players who were involved in the specific decision. The proposed procedure is a subset of the activities that are included in MACRAME, a decision support system that can be applied when a multi-actor and ill-structured situation needs to be analysed in order to generate a clear problem formulation, a structured and reliable model of the problem and the application of the model to evaluate and propose decision actions or solutions.