Intranets, Portals & Organizations
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System Evaluations Due Now
Readings Review
Book Reports
Research Paper Discussion
Organizing Knowledge
• Knowledge, not economies of scale, make an
organization effective (worthwhile)
• Organizing is critical, context over content?
• Is the organization greater than the sum of its
people?
- Knowledge?
- Social structures, cultural norms
• What isn’t a knowledge firm now?
Balancing Organizing
• How do you organize organization
information?
- Decentralized, bottom-up?
- Centralized, top-down?
- Yes, both.
• Does technology help?
- More collection = more organization
- Organizational memory vs. technological memory
- Increased communication
Communities of Practice
• Power to the people?
• The growth of user groups
• Sharing (& showing) know-how
- Engineering & competency
- Managing by example
• Respect for experience
• How to CoP form?
- Luck, geography, interest, fiat
- Email, listservs, groupware, intranet
Markets & Groups
• Sharing & organizing
- Power taggers, Free riders
- Automation, By the book
• Hierarchy of the organization is the organizing
principle?
• Are you not a member until you share?
• Asking for help vs. searching for help
- “knowledge moves differently within a community,
than it does between them” p 100
• Good organizations breathe knowledge inside
& out
Architecture of Organizing
• Roles
- Translators
- Knowledge Brokers
• Acts
- Boundary Objects (point of view about knowledge)
as bridges between groups
- Shaped by the use of, or acting with knowledge
• Tool Goals
- Informal
- Easy to share, easy to get recognized
- Open to participation
A Behavioral-Ecological Framework
• Designing an intranet to support knowledge work
embraces three nested layers:
- information behaviors
- value-added processes
- information ecology
• Proposes a user-centered framework, both top-down
and bottom-up.
An Integration Framework
A Behavioral-Ecological Framework, cont.
• An organization’s
information ecology
- influences what
information is produced
and stored
- what information is made
available and to whom
- what information is
required and valued in
task performance
• 8 elements should be
examined:
- the organization’s mission
- the intranet’s goals
- information management
plans
- information culture
- information politics
- physical setting
- information staff
- information handling
A Behavioral-Ecological Framework, cont.
• Information behaviors refer to the practices of
individuals and groups as they go about obtaining
and using information to resolve their work-related
problem situations.
- Define who the major sets of users are
- Identify what work they perform
- Understand how they require, acquire, and use information in the
course of engaging this work
A Behavioral-Ecological Framework, cont.
• As value-added processes, intranet
applications and services can be designed
- to support the information behaviors of users as they
resolve their work-related problem situations
- to fit or improve the organization’s information ecology
- to allow users to move seamlessly between accessing
content, engaging in communications, and collaborating
with others
- to facilitate the sharing, conversion, and combined use of
the organization’s tacit, explicit, and cultural knowledge
- to support the organization’s sense-making, knowledgecreating, and decision-making processes
The Creative Intranet
• Intranets support and facilitate corporate creativity
and the knowledge creation process
• Managing creativity is about raising the probability of
creative acts by stimulating the factors that foster
creativity.
• Characteristics of WWW and intranets
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Hyperlinked (user can visit any page/site in any order)
Networked (all sites are connected)
Open (unrestricted content and accessibility)
Organizational restricted (intranets only)
• The ad hoc nature of these technologies may be their best
feature
• The newness of intranets and their features may bring about new
uses
The Creative Intranet factors
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Alignment (being aware of, and working towards,
the same set of key goals)
Skunk Works (working outside established
bureaucracy and with minimal management control)
Serendipity (recognizing the potential in accidents)
Diverse Stimuli (exposing employees to new input)
Within-Company Communication and
Co-operation (meeting informally and sharing ideas)
Trust and Reciprocity (declaring officially the
importance of these values)
Intrinsic Motivation (cultivating employee interest
and enjoyment in their work)
Rich information provision (providing direct access
to search-and-retrieval media)
A New Generation of KM Applications
• Are we talking about KMS or Document Mgmt?
• Lotus Notes system called Knowledge Xchange (KX)
is used primarily for two purposes:
- Finding documents
- Finding subject matter specialists
• Underlying storage of Lotus Notes is weak—no
relationship across tables
- Database integration is hard enough, now knowledge
integration?
• Biography Generator (subjects, skills, time involved)
• Rate of Absorption (how quickly ideas incorporated)
• Social Networks (who has interacted with whom)
Biography View
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (LZW ) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Annotate: A Web KMS
• Organizations should provide a working
infrastructure, composed of a set of knowledge
management support systems (KMSS).
- Allow users to easily share information.
- Provide incentives to organizational members to participate
in knowledge sharing and refinement activities.
• Document repositories that span multiple intranet
servers pose a “marketing” problem.
- easy to place a document on any given server
- difficult to let other business units know when and a new
document repository has been created
• Any given business unit may become used to
searching only its own server.
- need to increase the scope of the search so that overlaps
between business units can be exploited
Annotate Issues
• Unstructured or semi-structured (template-based) documents
are often poor in semantic markup, making search-anddiscovery difficult.
• “Document Marketing”
• The Annotate system addresses the problem of designing an
enhanced retrieval software tool for retrieval of un- or semistructured document archives (i.e., lacking common
vocabularies and central authority).
• “Pre-Coordinate Ontology vs. Post-Coordinate Full Text Search”
• What about other systems, since this paper?
- Flickr
- Delicious
- CiteULike
Corporate Portal as info infrastructure
• Information on the Desktop
• (Web) Infrastructure for MIS
- Content access & viewing for better sense
- Organizational Communications for engagement, negotiations
- Collaboration for workflow between groups & K workers
• The new, new portal
- RSS, Blogs, Wikis and RSS readers
- Adaptive Web Services
• Usage based
• Rule based (quarterly)
• Focus on people (to drive usage)
- interactive interfaces
- Customization (content & services)
- Open access
• What percentage of portal work should be on Search?
Info Use Environments & Ecologies
• Taylor
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Typical settings - physical & cultural
Types of people - roles & tasks
Solving problems
Workflow synergy - preferences for working
• Davenport
- Avoid technology focus (& its constraints)
- Ecology (holistic)
• Creation, distribution, understanding & use of info
• Working with culture, not against
• Helping people accomplish their goals while
supporting the policies for structuring & controlling
organizational information
Reserch Paper Discussion
• First Draft Due next week (minimum 2 pages
of coherent, topical text)