Intranets, Portals & Organizations

1. Intranets, Portals & Organizations • System Evaluations Due Now • Readings Review • Book Reports • Research Paper Discussion

2. 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?

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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.

8. An Integration Framework

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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, knowledge-creating, and decision-making processes

12. 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 • 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

13. The Creative Intranet factors 1. Alignment (being aware of, and working towards, the same set of key goals) 2. Skunk Works (working outside established bureaucracy and with minimal management control) 3. Serendipity (recognizing the potential in accidents) 4. Diverse Stimuli (exposing employees to new input) 5. Within-Company Communication and Co-operation (meeting informally and sharing ideas) 6. Trust and Reciprocity (declaring officially the importance of these values) 7. Intrinsic Motivation (cultivating employee interest and enjoyment in their work) 8. Rich information provision (providing direct access to search-and-retrieval media)

14. 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)

15. Biography View

16. 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

17. Annotate Issues • Unstructured or semi-structured (template-based) documents are often poor in semantic markup, making search-and-discovery difficult. • “Document Marketing” • The Annotate system addresses the problem of designing an enhanced retrieval software tool for retrieval of un- or semi-structured 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

18. 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?

19. Info Use Environments & Ecologies • Taylor • 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

20. Reserch Paper Discussion • First Draft Due next week (minimum 2 pages of coherent, topical text)