A Tool for Supporting Knowledge Creation and Exchange in Knowledge Intensive Organisations Jasminko Novak (Fraunhofer-Institute for Media Communication, MARS Exploratory Media Lab, Germany, Dept. of Informatics, Systems, and Communication, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy,
[email protected])
Roberta Cuel (Dept. of Computer Science, University of Verona, Italy, Dept. of Informatics and Business Studies, University of Trento, Italy,
[email protected])
Marcello Sarini (Dept. of Informatics, Systems, and Communication, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy,
[email protected])
Michael Wurst (Dept. of Artificial Intelligence, University of Dortmund, Germany
[email protected])
Abstract: In this paper we describe a software tool which aims at supporting the interplay between autonomous management of local knowledge within communities and the sharing, negotiation and coordination of knowledge among different (heterogeneous) communities, in order to sustain perspective making and perspective taking leading to innovation. The developed system combines methods for constructing artefacts reflecting the patterns of language use in a community (LanguageMaps) through document clustering and creation of personalised concept networks, with interactive visualisation and with the Reconciler tool for explicit negotiation and alignment of meanings between disparate concepts into ontology-like structures. Keywords: knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, perspective making, perspective taking, distributed cognition, software tool. Category: K.4.3, H.1.1, H.5.2., H.5.3
1 Introduction In a dynamic environment and market, firms need more flexibility in creating new solutions, products, and services, focusing on the differentiation and specialization of their activities. In this scenario it seems that flexible production system is a strategic ability, which can be achieved through outsourcing and collaborations (both for small and big industries) [Dore, 1986], and heterogeneity should no longer be seen as a potential threat for organizations but as a potential source of improvement and innovation. Therefore firms have moved from hierarchical structures into networked
models (based on intra-organizational networks among strategic units, divisions, groups, etc.), and inter-organizational networks (such as industrial districts) have increased their importance [Hamel and Prahalad, 1990]. These types of organizations are composed by constellations of units not totally controlled by a unique subject. Such units are able to grow and differentiate their activities, in an autonomous way, and to obtain from them specialized services [Chandler, 1962]. From a knowledge management point of view each unit (often called community) is composed by individuals with a common sense making (i.e. view of the world, identity, shared mental model), it is organized in an autonomous way (i.e. routines, procedures, workflows, taxonomies) that better suit their local needs, and finally it is related with others through different type of relations (soft or hard relations: friendship, contracts, controls, and so on). In particular, the notion of communities as informal social networks based on locally shared interests and practices [Brown, 1991], [Lave and Wenger, 1991], [Wenger, 1998] has been increasingly used within knowledge intensive organizations [Starbuck, 1992]. Organizations can thus be viewed as constellations of communities of practices [Brown, 1991] with highly specialized expertise and activities, which cooperate and integrate their knowledge in a peer to peer setting, to create innovative products and processes in very turbulent environments [Purser and Pasmore, 1992]. This process intrinsically involves two needs: - the need to share meanings (of information, artefacts, procedures) among a community’s members. Knowledge is reified within physical, mental, and cultural artefacts, which stem from members participation. These artefacts are not a neutral organization of information but reflect specific community perspectives [Boland and Tenkasi, 1995], socio-technical frames [Goffman, 1974], thought worlds [Dougherty, 1992], contexts [Ghidini and Giunchiglia, 2001] and cognitive paths [Weick, 1979]. In short, a knowledge representation is always the result of a sense-making process, which reifies the point of view of those who take part in that process into personalized artefacts. - the need to negotiate and coordinate meanings among different communities, which manage specialized knowledge. Because of local needs, different background, contexts, and artefacts, local knowledge is managed and represented in different ways that better suit the communities’ needs. Thus, communities share, convert, negotiate and cooperate only through negotiation of perspectives. These processes are facilitated and mediated by particular artefacts such as boundary objects [Bowker and Star, 2000] and human knowledge brokers [Wenger, 1998]. These two dual needs reflect the tension between the need for highly specialized organization of work and the need for flexible inter-group cooperation within organizations. This is reflected in the tension between the need for highly articulated local perspectives that make-up the communication and knowledge creation tissue of individual communities, and the need for shared perspectives that allow communication across different communities [Mark et al., 2002].
In a knowledge intensive firm, then, the sharing and reconciliation of multiple perspectives is necessary for reifying new knowledge within communities (specialization/sharing needs) and for sharing and reproducing knowledge among them (cooperation/negotiation needs). In particular, from an innovation point of view, the continuous interplay of multiple local perspectives is a critical factor. In fact, as observed by different authors, the main source of innovation and the creation of new knowledge are interactions at the boundaries between different communities [Brown, 1991]. In contrast with these needs, existing work has largely focused on understanding and supporting the creation and sharing of knowledge within a shared perspective, namely among members of a community. The common outcome of knowledge management (KM) systems is the creation of an Enterprise Knowledge Portal (EKP), a (webbased) interface which provides a common access point to corporate knowledge. Even if users have different profiling systems, the underlying representation of EKP is typically unique, and is meant to represent a common and shared perspective of corporate knowledge that enables communication and knowledge sharing across the entire organization [Davenport et al., 1998], [Borghoff and Pareschi, 1998]. Thus, a critical question to be considered becomes: how can the interaction for the negotiation of shared meaning between members of different (heterogeneous) communities be stimulated and supported? In this sense, we need to rethink the way in which KM systems are designed. A KM system has to support people during two qualitatively different processes: the management of local knowledge representation, and their coordination and negotiation to support cross-fertilization and knowledge sharing. In other words, it has to allow multiple knowledge representations within the knowledge system of a complex organization [Bonifacio et al., 2002]. In particular such KM tools must allow: - each organizational unit to make explicit and stronger its common perspective; to support making sense of its daily practices, local know-how (perspective making [Boland and Tenkasi, 1995]) and reification of knowledge into artefacts (single loop learning [Argyris and Schön, 1978]); - each unit to access a different viewpoint on the organization, and to get an intuition of how the world would look like from a different perspective (perspective taking [Boland and Tenkasi, 1995], double loop learning [Argyris and Schön, 1978]). In this paper we describe a software tool which allows a community to manage knowledge (through reification processes) in an autonomous way, and to share, negotiate and coordinate knowledge among different and specialized communities, in order to sustain perspective making and perspective taking leading to innovation [Novak and Wurst, 2003]. The developed system combines methods for constructing LanguageMaps through document clustering and extraction of personalised concept networks from texts, with interactive visualisation and with the Reconciler tool supporting explicit negotiation to achieve alignment of meanings between disparate concepts and their formalization into ontology-like structures. This aims at facilitating the two different processes of:
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perspective making: the process whereby a community of knowing develops and strengthens its own knowledge domain and practices [Boland and Tenkasi, 1995]. Knowledge is reified both from participation processes of communities’ members, and from a more explication of constructs, where more coherent meaning structures are developed than preceding ones [Waddington, 1957] and [Werner, 1957]. These activities allow both to represent and to reinforce implicit patterns of language used in the community into artefacts. perspective taking: the process whereby a community of knowing estimates what others know. Using stereotypes and inference heuristics a community is able to compare its knowledge and judge the evolution of its perspective. This implies that the system must make visible different local perspectives to community members and stimulates the creation of shared perspectives as boundary objects for collaboration.
2 Constructing Language Maps as Artefacts Reflecting Community Perspectives The point of departure is that constructing artefacts which make visible the patterns of language used in a given community (LanguageMaps) is a way of representing different local perspectives and a means to stimulate the discussion of their respective meanings and relationships between different views. At the same time this should provide a sufficient degree of equivocality for contrasting opinions to get voiced and thus to facilitate explicit negotiation of meaning through social interaction. Thus both perspective making and perspective taking [Boland and Tenkasi, 1995] are supported. The notion of Language Maps is introduced as a combination of two main elements: the ConceptMaps and the ContextMaps. The ConceptMaps are networks of terms that represent groups of different words used in similar contexts and the relationships between them. They are constructed by analysing contexts of word usage in abstracts of documents from the community information pool through statistical text analysis combined with a self-organised Kohonen network [Honkela 1997]. Concepts are defined as statistically most significant words whose meaning is described by contexts in which they appear. On one hand, these contexts are represented as sets of words that most frequently appear in the neighbourhood of the given concept. On the other hand, a related Context Map is constructed that represents relationships between concepts and groups of documents which appear in similar thematic contexts. In this way documents are considered as examples of concrete instances in which the concepts represented in the ConceptMap have been used. By inspecting the documents related to a given concept, it is possible to get a better impression of the meanings that a given concept might carry within a given community. In order to allow a quick impression of different contexts of meanings the document clusters are also described by most important keywords found by the text analysis. In this way the ContextMap allows the user to gain an understanding of the overall contexts of community discourse (as reflected in the information artefacts in the community repository) and to inspect the meanings that different concepts carry in this community, based on the contexts of their use. Thus, we hypothesise that such a combination of context and concept relationships can be considered as an artefact that reflects patterns of language use in a given community (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. A Language Map consisting of a ConceptMap (right) & ContextMap (left)
3 Elicitating Personal Perspectives Into Shared Community Structures In order to elicit more specific personal perspectives the system generated maps can be personalised by the users who can explore the maps to select relevant documents and relationships between them. They construct a personal ContextMap by selecting individual items into personal collections and by arranging them according to their personal understanding of their meaning; that is by creating groups of objects and defining cluster labels. In particular, user-defined labels are introduced as concepts that describe the context of individual document groups. In this way the user provides a template which reflects her personal point of view. Based on the analysis of the user’s personal ContextMaps, the system then extracts a personal ConceptMap, which displays a network of the most relevant terms and the connections between them, as „seen“ from user’s perspective. The user defined labels of document contexts are taken as principal concepts. The most relevant terms for the document clusters of a given user are put in relation to user-defined principal concepts. Finally, based on cooccurrences of terms in maps of all users, an overall structure of relationships between words and concepts in the maps of all users is created. This results in a “collaborative Language Map” that puts in relation individual views as one possibility for constructing a shared conceptual structure. 4 Reconciling Meanings Between Different Communities The Reconciler tool [Sarini and Simone, 2002] has been designed to provide a support for facilitating mutual learning among members of different communities. The initial consideration is that the members of a community build their own artefacts reflecting the local perspective shared among members (perspective making). Problems arise when members of different communities have to collaborate because each of them rely on local artefacts which may refer to terms and documents considered in a way the members of other communities are not able to interpret. The Reconciler tool then is able to support the negotiation process among community members where the
meanings of the various local artefacts are aligned (and hence perspective taking). In doing this, it provides an interface where it is possible to objectify the agreed alignment of meanings in terms of correspondences which explicitly constitute an artefact conveying mutual learning among different members. In fact, this artefact may be used by the various members to evoke the richness of discussions made during the negotiation process stimulating mutual learning and the emergence and sharing of inter-community knowledge. According to the way a “collaborative Language Map” is created, it may be considered as an explicit artefact reflecting the local perspective shared among community members which still keeps the relationships with the personal perspectives of the each member of the community (perspective making). Since we want to support members of different communities in the creation and sharing of inter-community knowledge, collaborative Language Maps of each community may be considered as artefacts triggering this process. In fact, the negotiation process where the meanings of different concepts used in different collaborative Language Maps are discussed and aligned is a mutual learning process [Sarini and Simone, 2002] where creation and sharing of inter-community knowledge (and emergence of perspective taking) may be facilitated. To stimulate the negotiation of meanings a selected group of members from different communities are involved in a negotiation phase devoted to reconciling meanings of the different concepts and relationships belonging to the local collaborative Language Map of each community (Fig. 2). To this end the proposed collaborative Language Maps are displayed on a projection screen. If needed, individual personal maps can be also called up on a second projection as the discussion unfolds. Relationships between personal maps and the collaborative map can be visualised to help participants better understand the structure of the collaborative Language Maps and to iterate the negotiation process for aligning meanings of different concepts and relationships. Throughout the discussion a facilitator collects new correspondences between concepts and contexts as they are recognized by the participants and records them through the Reconciler tool. Every correspondence established between two concepts of different collaborative Language Maps is accompanied by a description inserted by the facilitator, including a relation to relevant contexts and documents identified in the discussion. correspondences community local perspective collaborative Language Map
community local perspective collaborative Language Map
personal Maps
personal Maps
reconciliation of meanings community members
community members
Figure 2. The reconciliation process
Thus the Reconciler tool allows the facilitator to collect all the correspondences established during the negotiation process without privileging a solution even if multiple correspondences involving different concepts may look ambiguous. Since there exists a multiplicity of views, there is no pretence that only one is the “correct” interpretation. In fact the key idea of the Reconciler is not to provide an automatic tool to detect and solve possible ambiguity among concepts of different collaborative Language Map. Instead, the aim is to provide an artefact objectifying the correspondences established during the negotiation process so that they can be used later on to evoke to the different members the overall process where the alignment of the different meanings of the considered concepts and relationships have been discussed. This means that the shared meanings that have emerged in the process of discussion are both internalized by the participants facilitating mutual learning and externalized in artefacts that can be visualized and used to support later on community interactions: such as using the resulting maps for online access to community repositories [Novak and Wurst, 2003] or to support mutual understanding in online communication [Mark et al., 2002]. 5 Conclusions and Future Work In this paper we proposed a tool aimed at supporting both aspects of perspective making and perspective taking, leading to innovation. For what concerns perspective making the tool supports community members in the construction of a “collaborative language Map”, an artefact reflecting patterns of language use in a given community. The use of this artefact is twofold; first, it reifies the local community knowledge; second, it may be used in combination with other collaborative Language Maps as boundary objects to facilitate perspective taking. By using the tool these artefacts may be enriched with correspondences which result from the negotiation of meanings of elements between different collaborative Language Maps, thus facilitating perspective taking. The system used for the construction of Language Maps, the elicitation of personalised structures and extraction of collaborative concepts networks has been developed and evaluated in the AWAKE project1 [Novak et al, 2002], [Novak and Wurst, 2004], [Novak, Wurst, Kunz, 2004]. Several prototypes of the Reconciler tool have been developed to test its functionalities in different scenarios [Mark et al., 2002], [Sarini and Simone, 2002]. Current work focuses on the integration of the AWAKE system with the Reconciler tool and on the empirical evaluation of the described artefacts in sustaining the interplay between perspective making among members in the same community and perspective taking between members of heterogeneous communities. References [Argyris and Schön, 1978]Argyris, C.; Schön D.A.; Organizational Learning, Addison-Wesley, Reading,1978 1
http://awake.imk.fraunhofer.de
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