Abstract not found

Abstract. Many small and medium-sized companies that develop software experience the same problems repeatedly, and have few systems in place to learn from their own mistakes as well as their own successes. Here, we propose a lightweight method to collect experience from completed software projects, and compare the results of this method to more widely applied experience reports. We find that the new method captures more information about core processes related to software development in contrast to experience reports that focus more on management processes. 1

Abstract: Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization's future course of action. Depending on the organization's beliefs about environmental analyzability and the extent that it intrudes into the environment to understand it, four modes of scanning may be differentiated: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, enacting, and searching. We analyze each mode of scanning by examining its characteristic information needs, information seeking, and information use behaviors. In addition, we analyze organizational knowing processes by considering the sensemaking, knowledge creating and decision

Knowledge management is becoming a fashion in many organizations. This entails the danger that large investments in knowledge externalization are made with little short-term repayment. Moreover, there is a risk that knowledge management administrations operate in parallel and with little connection to the business processes. We argue that the main purpose of business knowledge is improved action, and therefore we must interrelate processes of knowledge creation and usage with the normal business processes both on a conceptual and a system level. The paper presents a model-based approach for solving this integration problem, and describes an implementation architecture which links knowledges processes to a workflow environment. Experiences in an organization where our system was successfully installed indicate that such a "light-weight" integrated solution offers a relatively easy and immediately useful entry point into organizational knowledge management.

Organizations need to build and use knowledge to remain viable in the face of competition and change. Due to the limits of organization and the bounded rationality of individuals working within the organizations it is impossible to make all of the required knowledge accessible in explicit and readily retrievable formats. Much of the knowledge an organization needs is held tacitly by members of the organization. This "personal knowledge" is normally inaccessible to other members because they have no way to know that it exists. Communities of practice help to mobilize personal knowledge. In this paper we present and discuss the emergence of communities of practice, some tools, concepts and an ontology we have prototyped to facilitate the development of these communities. Such communities provide avenues for sharing and transferring normally hidden knowledge.

In many organizations, collaborating with peers, sharing resources, and codifying know-how are not typical facets of work activity. For such organizations, knowledge management support must help people identify and orient to opportunities for collaboration and sharing, articulate values and best practices, and assimilate sharing knowledge as an everyday experience. We discuss a participatory design project in which we are exploring these issues in the design of knowledge management support for public school teachers, leveraging a community networking infrastructure and everyday representational frameworks for knowledge. Organizations learn and have knowledge. The

Nonaka describes the process of creating knowledge in enterprises as an interplay of tacit and explicit knowledge. In the interdisciplinary German FOQUS project, industrial engineers and computer scientists have investigated information systems support for this process in the context of a specific knowledge creation strategy, "learning from failures". In the domain of failure management for complex production machinery, Nonaka's socialization is supported by service-oriented workflows, externalization is supported by a domain-oriented meta model facilitating the construction of failure models, combination and internalization are supported by formal conflict resolution techniques and informal hypermedia representations. All of these representations are held in a knowledge-based repository. A implementation of the approach is operational in the Aditec demonstration factory at Aachen.

We elaborate on Pettigrew’s (1998, 1999) theory of information grounds while using an outcome evaluation approach enriched by its focus on context to explore the use of need-based services by immigrants in New York City. Immigrants have substantial information and practical needs for help with adjusting to life in a new country. Because of differences in language, culture, and other factors such as access, new immigrants are a difficult population to study. As a result, little research has examined their predilections from an information behavior perspective. We report findings from a qualitative study of how literacy and coping skills programs are used by and benefit the immigrant customers of the Queens Borough Public Library (QBPL). From our interviews and observation of 45 program users, staff, and other stakeholders, we derived a grand context (in Pettigrew’s terms) woven from three subcontexts: the immigrants of Queens, New York; the QBPL, its service model, and activities for immigrants; and professional contributions of QBPL staff. Our findings are discussed along two dimensions: (a) building blocks toward information literacy, and (b) personal gains achieved by immigrants for themselves and their families. We conclude that successful introduction to the QBPL—as per its mission, programming, and staff—can lead immigrants to a synergistic information ground that can help in meeting broad psychological, social, and practical needs.

Abstract. Most research on the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the workplace has focused on companies that adopted ICT after many years of working without it. However, companies that have been “always connected ” may offer different lessons. In this study, we look at how workers at an Internet-era company obtain information they need to do their jobs. We look at both human and documentary sources of information; whether those sources are accessed online or offline; and the impact of type of information source and access on individual performance. Results parallel past research with two significant differences: 1) workers accessed human sources via online channels more frequently than via offline channels, and 2) higher individual performance was associated with online access to human sources rather than offline access to human sources. The findings have implications for theories of knowledge management and uses and effects of technology in organizations. 1

Knowledge management (KM) remains an anomaly in most corporations today. Critics call KM a fad of the 1990s, whereas supporters claim KM is actively evolving. Our work examines the disciplinary rhetoric of KM: how is it that practitioners of KM seek to legitimize their field in the corporate world? We focus on practitioners in the aerospace industry and their forum. We argue that this forum serves as a hub for constructing KM’s legitimacy. Our two year ethnography traces the rhetorical strategies utilized by informants in and out of a professional community to legitimize KM as discipline in the aerospace industry.