1. Intranets, Portals & Organizations
Presentation
Readings Review
Book Report
Research Paper Proposals 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
, 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. 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

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?
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