Intranets, Portals and Organizational Knowledge

1. Intranets, Portals and Organizational Knowledge Helena Loh INF 385Q Knowledge Management Systems, Fall 2005 KMS Topic Discussion 27 October 2005

2. Presentation Outline • Definition of Intranets and Portals • Articles: • Lee & Gaines (1996) • Roberts-Witt (1999) • Ackerman & Halverson (2000) • Vasconcelos, Kimble & Gouveia (2000) • Brinn, Carrico & Combs (2001) • Large, Beheshti & Rahman (2002) • Millen, Fontaine & Muller (2002) • Impact on Organizational Knowledge • Some Conclusions • Bibliography

3. Intranets and Portals • An Intranet is “a network within a single company which enables access to company information through the familiar tools of the Internet such as web browers.” (Chaffey, 1998) • A portal is “a single Web browser interface used within organizations to promote the gathering, sharing and dissemination of information throughout the enterprise.” (Detlor, 2000) • Web portals e.g. MyYahoo, Google News, UT Direct

4. Lee & Gaines (1996) • The use of the Internet as a tool for acquiring knowledge • Conceptual model of Socioware: • “computer-mediated environments for supporting community-wide processes which expedite virtual cooperative interactions.” • Goal to facilitate cooperative behavior for self-organized virtual collaborative communities • Time dimension: Synchronous/asynchronous/publication • Creation of interaction area -> shared knowledge • Analysis of the model suggests • Improvement of message quality • Incorporation of links to preserve discourse relationships • Awareness support - reduction of time in locating relevant information • Tools that develop models for discourse processes may result in improved use of Net resources Article

5. Roberts-Witt (1999) • Corporate portals as KM’s killer app • Knowledge worker control of information • What drives the corporate portal • Thin clients (i.e. web browsers) • Highly-dispersed workforce • 3 types of portals: • Data - structured, business • Information - less structured • Collaborative - group interactive functionality • Corporate portals lead to true consolidated computing enabling corporations to capitalize on what workers know and should know Article

6. Ackerman & Halverson (2000) • Study of organizational memory (OM) • Telephone helpline for HR questions • Use of CAll Tracking system (CAT) • Employee verification needed • Distributed memory - telephone, paper, CAT, EMPLOY, employee • Boundary objects • Dependence on external maintenance of employee records • Employee’s own memory - performs task correctly • Decontextualization • Recontextualization for reuse • No unified OM per se - mixed provenance • OM as both KM object (repository) and process (contextualization)

7. Vasconcelos, Kimble & Gouveia (2000) - I • Ontology as semantic network • Provides syntactic and semantic terms for describing knowledge about a domain • Organizational Memory (OM) • Defined as a computer system • A means for past knowledge to be brought into present activities • Enables organizational learning and continuous process improvement • Test and implement knowledge modelling techniques using ontologies - focus: manage Less Tangible Knowledge Assets (LTKAs)

8. Vasconcelos, Kimble & Gouveia (2000) - II Group Memory System • Group Memory (GMe) ontology • Design rational system • Case-based reasoning • Application layer

9. Vasconcelos, Kimble & Gouveia (2000) - III • Encompasses individual and team-based knowledge • Displays different knowledge dimensions within organizational workgroups • Is used to analyze and evaluate competence levels within the organization • Allows the facilitation of communication • Creates and promote collaborative workgroups that can work together on projects

10. Brinn, Carrico & Combs (2001) • Cougaar (Cognitive Agent Architecture) • Software architecture that enables building distributed agent-based applications • Developed for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) by ALP (Advanced Logistics Project) for military logistics • Built for vast amounts of information that standard software modeling equipment cannot handle • Suited for domains that are hierarchical, complex, widespread, dynamic, modeled by emergent behavior of components • Uses distributed query/response system approach - clustered information • Powerful web-based interface • Agents become their own intranet, providing information across the society

11. Large, Beheshti & Rahman (2002) - I • Study of 4 focus groups - Web users (10-13 years old) • To identify design criteria to subsequently develop kids’ portals, including portal goals, visual design, information architecture, and personalization • Portals: Ask Jeeves for Kids, KidsClick, Lycos Zone, Yahooligans! • Should educate and entertain; be visually attractive; provide keyword search facilities and browsable subject categories; and allow user personalization • Prime use of Internet in schools: Web as information resource to support class projects

12. Large, Beheshti & Rahman (2002) - II • Conclusions: • Entertainment distractions • Clearly identified routes to information retrieval • Attention-grabbing colors - applied throughout interface • Portal’s name - easy URI to remember • No advertisements or revenue-gathering devices • Quick direct access to information e.g. linked subject categories, letters of the alphabet • Short annotations of retrieved sites • Disliked extensive scrolling • Personalization for children’s sites not extensive

13. Millen, Fontaine & Muller (2002) - I • Study of benefits and costs to Communities of Practice in collaboration, social interaction, productivity and organizational performance • Use organizational support and value as focus to base the study • Benefits: individual, community, and organizational • Community • Increased idea creation • Increased quality of knowledge and advice • Problem-solving • Established common context • Forum for free expression of creativity • Shared ideas

14. Millen, Fontaine & Muller (2002) - II • Organizational benefits: tangible business outcomes • Successfully executed projects • Increased new business • Product innovation • Time-saving • Costs • Participation time for community members - supporting community roles (other than own work roles) • Meeting and conference expenses - travel, accommodation, teleconferencing • Technology - group messaging, community websites • Content publishing - online content development, production of media and promotional materials • Measurement and demonstration is difficult

15. Impact on Organizational Knowledge • Due to communities of practice, organizational knowledge is inevitably heavily social in character (Brown & Duguid, 1998) • Annotate (a KMSS system) in an Intranet increases knowledge throughput by increasing the flow of relevant information across business units (Ginsburg & Kambil, 1999) • The data mining KX supports communities of practice that share and reuse knowledge (Liongsari, Dempski & Swaminathan, 1999) • Intranets support the creation, sharing and use of knowledge (Choo, Detlor & Turnbull, 2000) • Decentralizing of information via the Web and Intranet allows information to flow vertically and horizontally (Stenmark, 2000) • Portals provide a “shared information work space” (Detlor, 2000)

16. Some Conclusions • Collaborative work space • Information flow vertically and horizontally • More dispersion of knowledge, (ideally) more democratic the organization • Within organization - bottom-up structures • With external organizations - spider network • Asynchronous communication

17. Bibliography • Vasconcelos, J., Kimble, C., & Gouveia, F. (2000) A Design for a Group Memory System Using Ontologies. Proceedings of the 5th UKAIS Conference. Cardiff. McGraw Hill. • Millen, D., Fontaine, M., Muller, M. (2002) Understanding the Benefit and Costs of Communities of Practice. Communications of the ACM. 45(4), 69-73. ACM Press. • Lee, L.& Gaines, B. (1996) Knowledge Acquisition Processes in Internet Communities. Proceedings of the 10th Knowledge Acquisition Workshops, Banff, Canada November 9-14, 1996. • Brinn, Marshall; Carrico, Todd and Combs, Nathan. Every Agent a Web Server, Every Agent a Community Intranet. Proceedings from Agents'01. Montreal, Quebec, CANADA. ACM Press. • Ackerman, Mark S. & Halverson, Christine A. Reexamining Organizational Memory. Communications of the ACM. 43(1), 59-64. ACM Press. • Roberts-Witt, S. L. (1999, July). Making sense of portal pandemonium. Knowledge Management Magazine • Large, A., Beheshti, J. & Rahman, T. (2002) Design Criteria for Children's Web Portals: The Users Speak Out. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 53(2): 79-94. • Chaffey, D. (1998) Groupware, workflow and intranets: reengineering the enterprise with collaborative software. Boston, MA: Digital Press.