Future research in KMS
• Huge potential… forever?
• How can you avoid over-promising?
• Organizations & culture must change in
concert with KMS
- A changed organization still has to function within
the world
• People are hard to understand
- Idiosyncratic behaviors
- Rationality & profitability
• Entrepreneurial vs. Administrative functions
What’s the Future of KM?
• Davenport, 10 years later
- Did Lotus Note & the Web merge?
- Agents- no, keywords searches - yes!
• KM as Mgmt Enthusiasm
• “categorization and organization of
knowledge will be a core competence for
every firm”
- Importance, vocabulary & tools for access
• Ensuring that K gets transferred
• Enabling conversations (relationships) b/t
creators & users
Networked K Organization
• Everything is or has a network
• Organizing knowledge across cultures
• Multiple facets of knowledge
- Viewing
- Representing (ontologies)
• Does more digital knowledge = more potential
for KM?
Information Tech & KMS
• Is well-conceived & used IT really KMS?
• IT provides a lot of leverage to find, extract &
use knowledge
- More work or smarter work?
- Replacing technologies, not improving work
• Information Junkyards
- Volume vs. Findability & Actionability
• Extending our reach
- CMC - email, blogs, social networks
- Real time & distributed time
Changing what Knowledge
means?
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Knowing is a human act
Knowledge is the residue of thinking
Knowledge is created in the present moment
Knowledge belongs to communities
Knowledge circulates throgh communities in
many ways
• New Knowledge is created at the boundaries
of old
• Leveraging knowledge involves a
combination of people & IT
• McDermott , p3
How should we use IT?
• Speed up the coordination
- Forms, agendas, bureaucracy
• Extend collaboration
- Structures to support each other
- Dynamic help for knowledge creation
• Work with existing terms & practices
- Just make them better, not different
- One size does not fit all
• Culture changes for groups & individuals
Does IT Matter?
• Productivity has improved, but not consistently or
definitively
• Organizations have changed, but not much?
• An increase in competitiveness, understanding or
innovation?
• Doesn’t everyone have this “advantage” now?
• Has IT changed organizational strategy?
- Tactics have changed, but in simple ways
- Cultural expectations have not changed
• IT keeps changing into help solving the NEXT
problem
- You can’t stop using it to see effects
- Constant upgrades = time + $$$
Navigating Social Cyberspaces
• Understanding Usenet use
- Postings
• Why
• How
• Information
- Distribution
• Cross postings
• Specific groups & cultures
- Free-riders vs. Contributors
- Usenet readers
Social Cyberspace Dimensions
• Netscan – social accounting metrics
- Size of group
- Culture
- Social cues
• Messaging protocols
- Asynchronous
- Real time (IM)
• Discussion Engagement
- Frequency, Replies
- Date, Time
• Thread and Author Tracker
- Thread Visualization
- New Threads vs. Replying to Old
Blogs & Social Dimensions
• Are blogs taking the place of newsgroups?
• RSS Readers
• Topic discovery methods
- Blog rolls
- Search engines
- Links
• Issues of Awareness
• Posting technologies s. Usenet
Answer Garden
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A shared organizational memory system
Storing, retrieving and viewing information
What methods worked best?
What about user paricipation?
What’s an optimal size?
Agents & Agency
• What do we mean by agents?
- Science Fiction?
- Physical or Virtual?
• Are agents just a metaphor?
• By defining agents are we defining
intelligence?
- Replacing people with agents
- Replacing systems with agents
• Agents force us to discover & address tacit
knowledge (experience) in knowledge work
Agents are here
That’s agents, not robots
What kinds of agents are there?
• Intelligent Agents
- Show “intelligence” in interacting with
the environment
- Act based on previous facts or rules
- Make leaps of intuition
- Do things for you
• Autonomous Agents
- Interact with the environment
- Stimulus & response, not always rules
- Can perform a wider range of
activities over time
- Do things we do not or can not do
Agents & Angels
• Agents as help to manage information
• Agents also are creating lots of new data
• Possible uses
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Managing our social life
Replace conventional organizations
Helping us find things (web crawlers)
Performing repetitive information tasks
• A human face on information tasks?
- Jeeves, Watson, Sherlock, Eliza, the Wizard
- Pushes our interaction into something more
“natural”
Agents or Angels?
• Who manages the agents?
• When is a decision made?
- Upon arrival of the information
- After information is compared
- Blink vs. DeepThought
• Is it possible to make our information use
behavior transparent?
- Is it flattering?
- What if we find too much information?
• Enabling more knowledge work or just more
work?
- Speed vs. Accuracy
Ranks of Agents
• Information Brokering
- Networks & the Web
- Search & Overload Management
• Product Brokering
- Shopping (Buying?)
- Recommendations / Collaborative Filtering
• Merchant Brokering
- Personalization, Customer “service”
- Logical, naïve decisions & gaming
• Negotiating
- Multi-part decisions
- Conversation?
How agents should work
- Observe interface actions & act
- Run “in the background” to
- Manipulate information (& the interface) for you
• Why this personalized view of agent
interactions?
- Understanding one person is difficult enough
- Group interactions require making relationships
explicit
Reducing Info Overload = KM?
• Most apt use of agents in the last 10 years
- Might be creating more information for us to
manage
- Increases explicit knowledge,but tacit?
• We need agents to help do things in real time,
without our intervention
• The Web & agents are a good match
• Understanding behavior & training agents
- Watching, examples, (others) profiles
- Not filtering as much as ordering
• Might be most interesting to see others’
agents, not your own
The Big Question(s)
• How can KMS help people coordinate,
discover & organize information and
knowledge?
• How can intranets, groupware, weblogs,
wikis, instant messaging, search engines,
PIMs & email in both individual and
organizational contexts help us manage
knowledge?
• Are certain types of KMS suitable for certain
types of tasks, groups or roles?