Less is More - When IT Comes to Knowledge Management - CiteSeerX

Less is More - When IT Comes to Knowledge Management Maj Gunnarssona, Tomas Lindrothb, Maria Magnussonc, PeO Rasmussond & Ulrika Snise [email protected] a, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] & [email protected]

Laboratorium for Interaction Technology University of Trollhättan/Uddevalla Sweden

Abstract In this work we take the point of departure from two thoroughly conducted case studies, in which we have analysed certain knowledge work activities with following implications for design. Both studies clearly stated the call for a ICT-support when searching information and sharing knowledge. For example, sharing bookmarks among knowledge workers seemed to be a necessary and useful activity. Important and valuable bookmarks often mirror what kind of information and knowledge people are looking for, and also what kind of forum they usually go to on the world wide web. In this work we have developed a prototype, KnowMan, which manages bookmarks on the world wide web. The prototype is designed as a user-friendly "pad-interface" in which bookmarks can be collaboratively collected, shared and further explored and annotated by other knowledge workers. We end up with a general discussion about the possible effects of using KnowMan and what further design aspects that should be considered.

Keywords: knowledge work, case studies, knowledge sharing applications, web application, sharing bookmarks, social navigation, collaborative filtering

1. Introduction Knowledge has become a key concept for companies when developing their business processes. In this development information and communication technology (ICT) is considered as a tool aiming at augment the knowledge creating and sharing processes. In these processes the demands on the individual worker become increasingly high; e.g. keep in pace with the surrounding high tech advancements and at the same time manage their competence development within their own subject area, expert domain. Also, the collaborating factor is considered important. People need to work together in order to create knowledge about the work domain and to provide the capabilities and resources required in complex settings. Thus knowledge-intensive work activities often concern collaborative problem-solving and support that require a more effective way of handling information and knowledge between different people, both in here and now situations and over long periods of time. Systems aiming at support such situations are now current. Proceedings of IRIS 23. Laboratorium for Interaction Technology, University of Trollhättan Uddevalla, 2000. L. Svensson, U. Snis, C. Sørensen, H. Fägerlind, T. Lindroth, M. Magnusson, C. Östlund (eds.)

These technologies (e.g. e-mail, groupware packages, hypertext systems, and Intranets or Extranets) have in recent years been on the list of knowledge management efforts (Andreu & Ciborra, 1998). New web-based application tools provide support for workgroups via collaborative workspace (Kirn, 1997). More specifically, a number of applications of groupware support tools have been carefully investigated until today (see for example Orlikowski, 1992; Alavi, 1997; Conklin, 1998; Ackerman & Halvorsen, 1998; Robertson et al., 2000; Swan et al, 2000). When considering ICT-support in such circumstances many organisations implement huge systems, normally called knowledge management systems. These systems have a variety of groupware functionality offered to its users. However, the main results from the previous studies show the difficulties of such efforts. Thus, we argue that, due to its complexity, one such "over-all" system should not be considered. The successfulness of such project is quite the same as zero, as the individual knowledge worker does not want to add knowledge into such systems if not the answer to the question "What's in it for me?" has been answered "A lot!" quite many times for each of them. Instead we believe upon a design of a smaller application providing a subset of the functionality, which facilitates a process with user interaction, stepwise refinement, and effective management of knowledge in one single tool. As a knowledge worker you almost daily search for new information. The search process would involve both interaction with all the search engines on the web and interaction through communication with other people. There are several studies indicating that knowledge workers want to talk to each other in an intelligent conversation and not only interact with documents (Carstensen & Sørensen, 1997; Carstensen & Snis, 1999; Magnusson et al, 1999). Other studies show that searching the web means in many ways to "reinvent the wheel" as individual knowledge workers search and collect the same information, without knowing each other's collections. Systems that support knowledge workers when searching information, sharing knowledge, and finding others who have specific, desired information are increasingly interesting to project teams, organisations and scientific communities. Related work of Carstensen & Snis (1999) has further addressed what requirements common knowledge repositories, based on advanced information technological mechanisms like document archives, hypermedia spaces and other forms of shared repositories, further should fulfil. However, as we begin to design such system, it would be useful to determine what requirements that actually are needed for those users. Accordingly, we took the point of departure from two different case studies, both analysing the work context of highly skilled people working in a typical knowledge intensive environment, such as quality support and ICT consultancy. It is our goal to design an application that is truly derived from an analysis of users and their daily work tasks. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is two-folded: i) to base our arguments by describing two case studies with a following analysis of their design implications, ii) to design a small application, supporting a subset of these implications, and to discuss its usefulness in relation to the implications derived. Another ambition is to inform the design of knowledge technology. The suggestions are derived from our findings and, inspired by the general discussions of cscw, media spaces, common information spaces and computer-supported knowledge management at what their technological potentials are (e.g. Schmidt & Bannon, 1992; Schmidt & Simone, 1996; De Michelis, 1997). Other studies have shown that even small web-applications start to grow forward containing different kinds of services and functions. Dieberger (1999) has addressed the issue of designing for social navigation. However, these seem to be too general for groups to use. What we instead argue for is to study the specific work conditions for groups, specialised in certain knowledge domains,

and afterwards come up with a conformed solution in a small, simple and flexible websystem. In the next section we more specifically describe our data collecting methods and how the user information was gathered from two different case studies. The following section accounts for the main results from the cases. Implications for design in the other section we analyse the specific needs and requirements for ICT support. Our design of the KnowMan application, is presented in the following section and finally discussed in a more general context.

2. Method Our approach is based on the assumption that in order to obtain a coherent understanding of — and to design ICT-based tools for — knowledge workers, field studies are essential (see e.g., Keyser, 1992). This paper is based on data collected in two empirical studies of knowledge workers, who typically worked intensively with problem-solving and support activities; e.g quality support and ICT consultant. Both studies focused on which information and knowledge the actors gathered, how they organised and structured the information, how it was disseminated, and which means were applied for problemsolving, knowledge sharing, and learning activities. It was considered important to investigate the conditions for knowledge creation and sharing among knowledge workers who are geographically distributed and subjected to severe temporal constraints in their daily work in more depth. The case studies were exclusively based on qualitative data collection techniques such as non-participant observations and qualitative semi-structured interviews (Patton, 1980). The interview method used was Mc Cracken’s systematic guide for the open-ended long interview (Mc Cracken, 1988). The questionnaire was designed to give the investigator an efficient, productive, streamlined instrument of inquiry that at the same time provided openness and flexibility. The first empirical example that shall illustrate our arguments is derived from a field-study in a pharmaceutical company. This case comes from a group of quality assurance experts working in the central quality assurance function at a multi-national pharmaceutical company, Quantas Pharmas. The organisation is characterised by a constant need for fast and reliable updates of information that could influence how the production process of pharmaceuticals should be carried out. Information includes law regulations, policy documents that must be included in research and development as well as the manufacturing of the final remedy. Fifteen semi-structured interviews, five meetings, and several direct observations were carried out. The interviews were conducted during December 1998 until February 1999. To clarify themes and conceptions the material has been discussed with the employees in several informal meetings. Documents, on-line archives, paper-based repositories and other means for handling and managing information and knowledge were studied in details. The second case is derived from a study at one of 10 Scandinavian departments of the Swedish ICT consultancy firm Epsilon. Epsilon Data is one of six companies in the Epsilon Group. The department employed, as of March 1999, 15 ICT consultants, a secretary, a receptionist, and a manager. The organisation is characterised by a constant need for timely information to support the knowledge workers in their daily work. The fieldwork involved qualitative interviews, document inspection and participant observation. Six semi-structured interviews with a stratified sample of consultants investigated the perception of knowledge creation and sharing at Epsilon Data. Three of

the six interviewees had worked as consultants for around two years, and the remaining three had up to ten years experience in the field. The consultants had diverse educational backgrounds. The sample also represented a diversity of projects the consultants were engaged in and the department's only female consultant was interviewed. The interviews were conducted at the departmental office during two weeks in February 1999. During the interviews they were encouraged to give elucidative examples. It was not possible to arrange for complete anonymity since the interviews had to be scheduled by the manager who therefore knew the identity of the sampled consultants. The individual consultant was, however, kept anonymous in transcripts. The actual working conditions and organisational structures were studied in action through a number of visits to the departmental office during February and March 1999. These visits also included several interviews with the manager as well as studies of the company Intranet and transcripts of official documents. As we mentioned earlier, only some of the previous work tries to understand what knowledge management and knowledge work practice really are and what main activities that are included. Therefore, it would be of great importance to investigate field studies aiming at a thorough analysis of the actual knowledge work, in order to find requirements for computer support. What we did in our analysis, was to try deriving implications for design. When entering the design phase these implications served as a checklist of certain needs and requirements in order to align the specific features in the proposed system with the specific needs of the field workers. The design process has furthermore been iteratively performed as we have put the prototype into use in an early stage of the process. The user group at that stage was a collaborative and fairly large project group consisted of researcher and students, a typically group of knowledge workers performing problem solving and knowledge creating/sharing activities. During three months ”real” test data and user interaction were applied. Several comments and design ideas have been used as valuable information to continue the prototyping process. In order to further enrich this process we have assessed the usability of the KnowMan application by conducting an heuristic pre-evaluation inspired by Preece (1994), Nielsen (1996) and Scheiderman (1998). From the initial findings from this one we have learnt initial mistakes upon the design. This will help us to further explore features and shortcomings and finally start using it as a ready to use application. By using the results from several specific field studies in both analysis and design of ICT-supported knowledge management would be very fruitful when informing the general design of such systems. This also means that a specific field study may both gain from and contribute to the development of general applications for knowledge management.

3. The first case: Quality support at Quantas Pharmas The field study was carried out in a quality support group in a multi-national pharmaceutical company. Many regulatory authorities expect pharmaceutical manufacturers to comply with "good manufacturing practice", GMP, when starting manufacture for clinical trials. In order to deal with this highly regulated and complex industry it is extremely important to provide employees with the necessary knowledge of current GMP in means of operational documents and procedures. The quality support organisation in this pharmaceutical company was organised into seven different groups. Each of them had their own expertise area and their main purpose was to support the

product supply, development departments, and other sites within the organisation. The people working there were typically concerned with developing ideas, interpreting standards, solving problems, and exchanging knowledge. As a support department they depend heavily on the expertise of their employees and engage in value-added activities for their clients. Mainly, they put considerable emphasis on applied creativity for solving the problems of the internal departments. As a world wide company these sites were geographically dispersed.

3.1. Roles of the knowledge workers As knowledge workers in this particular setting the group had at least three different roles. First, they had the role of validation experts. They had to know all the GMP requirements about validation work. They needed to be fully updated in the on-going modifications in their expertise area, and they in turn tried to support and change the work of others by reformulating procedures and adjusting them to specific use within the organization. The second role was to assure quality in the use of GMP requirements. By reviewing, accepting and approving operational documents they assured that validation work was performed in compliance with current GMPs and other regulations. For instance the GMP guidelines needed a long preparation process in order to be applicable to the internal departments as ”the actual way of working”. This work activity involved interpretation, judgment, and reformulation. The third role was one of support. Acting as internal consultants they helped operational workers to plan the work of validation and to solve problems that occurred out in the product supply sites. The people in the quality support group had a large body of experience in quality and validation work and the technical skill and expertise of the employees were applied in many different ways.

3.2. Processes of knowledge creation and sharing One key activity for them, in the process of supporting and sharing knowledge, was to create new knowledge and to assure that the support activities were done correctly The work had to be properly planned, co-ordinated and documented in a collaborative effort throughout the organisational process. Their knowledge creation processes were facilitated by information acquisition as they continuously searched for external information and new knowledge in the environment. This was a fairly complex task as these external information repositories were subjected to be modified continuously. And this was not an optional task. The global regulatory affairs reflected changes to their own expertise area, which they had to keep in pace with. Furthermore, in this knowledge creation process, it is implied that information needs to be interpreted and developed, i.e. created, in order to be used in their work activities and thus contribute to better practices. Another initiation for knowledge creation, was the knowledge worker’s own initiatives. Reasons to those initiations were for instance their analysis of failures, daily work experiences, creative ideas, or efforts from the research and development function. This is a significant activity that draw upon acquire expertise and experiences from lessons learned. By participating in external conferences and courses the employees had opportunities to keep in pace with the extremely changing environment and new trends. Different kinds of meetings were as well very useful to the employees. Problem solving in ad-hoc meetings was a quite usual way of handling upcoming problems. These meetings were supposed to be very focussed and short. Another meeting form was focal

groups, which intention was to discuss problems and create new knowledge by putting people together with different perspectives on certain domain topics. When supporting people the specialists applied different ways of knowledge sharing processes. For example, remote problem-solving was the most common way, partly dependent on the distributed nature of not being co-located. In some situations they only used their own expertise when solving problems for the client. But in others, one client could call for a solution to a specific problem and thus the specialist needed to understand the context of this problematic case. The problem solving process required a socialization process in which they communicated and asked each other questions, thus clarifying the problem and its possible solutions. Discussions via phone-calls or emails were continued. Solutions could be given directly from the quality support employee by the use of her own expertise and experience, and did not require any use of explicit knowledge archives. Quite often they asked a colleague for advice. Sometimes a phone call might end in visiting the site where the problem occurred. Another popular way of supporting people and sharing knowledge was to hold mini-seminars. People from the operational units proposed some of those. Others were suggested from the specialist support group, seminars that they coincided that the coworkers needed. They strove at looking from the perspective of the users when proposing subject and target group in those mini seminars. Two of the employees in this quality support group were acting as "flyers", temporarily located at a client site during a rather long period of time, typically to be involved as a consultant in a specific project. They were assigned to such projects according to their own area of expertise, which might imply that two of them could be involved in the same project and complement each other. This was a very popular way of working; collaborate and actively participate in the operational work at the departments where the real problems occurred. The day-to-day work of the specialist group required people that were able to extract knowledge from their own expertise and other knowledge sources, structure the knowledge, distribute it, and maintain it over time. To support this process the quality support department had various knowledge sources for representing and storing important information and knowledge. Most of their explicit knowledge was organized in internal archives, as operational documents. These archives were all available from their Intranet for corporate knowledge sharing archives, as a means applied for organization and dissemination of corporate knowledge. In such situations a large number of explicit archives were accessed in their support activities, for example documents, procedures, technical reports, external regulatory guidelines, on-line databases and web pages. Most often they referred to on-line archives and web pages. They used those in order to supplement or verify their own knowledge.

4. The second case: Knowledge work at Epsilon Data The field study at Epsilon Data showed that it was a distributed organisation where the consultants’ daily conditions were distinguished by time pressure and rapid changes to the context of their work. This resulted in a complex setting for sharing knowledge and organisational learning and there was a constant need for learning and knowledge sharing in order to perform their tasks. However, the stressful working environment can also be perceived as dynamic and stimulating with great potential for personal development. It was therefore crucial that the organisation took the needs of the consultants seriously in

order to facilitate learning and improvements. There was a definite wish for design and development of flexible and effective ways of supporting learning and information sharing among the consultants.

4.1. Roles of the knowledge workers There were three types of projects that consultants at Epsilon Data could be assigned to: helpdesk, system administration and systems development. The projects vary in length from three months to several years with occasional staff replacements in long projects. Helpdesk and system administration projects were situated at clients in a 50-kilometre radius from the office. The helpdesk consultants all worked at Epsilon's biggest customer, a car manufacturer with several thousand employees, where they supported the Computer Assisted Design (CAD) software packages. Systems administrators worked alone or in pairs primarily on establishing and maintaining Unix clients and servers. System development projects were primarily situated at Epsilon's office. The manager was responsible for initial client negotiations, and two of the senior consultants were responsible for systems design and quality assurance. Teams of 1-3 junior consultants conducted the actual implementation. Collaboration between consultants were, apart from the cases when two or more consultants were situated the same place, primarily supported by telephone and email communication as well as by the company intranet system. Outside office hours people often meet for social activities such as concerts, sport events or parties. This was in nearly all the interviews highlighted as a distinct feature of the entire Epsilon Group and branded the "Epsilon spirit" which was introduced to all newcomers through an obligatory course. An introductory course in combination with frequent invitations to various social and work related events are examples of top management's efforts to promote the team spirit amongst the employees. In order to facilitate enrolment for new employees, it was intended that they would as a minimum work the first two weeks at the office were they would be introduced to working standards, routines and ongoing projects at the department. This brief introduction was followed by a personal career development meeting with the manager after which the newcomer was ready to work in projects. However, due to heavy workload and staff shortage, this principle was not always kept, and there was an example of a new consultant being sent off to a client the second day on the job.

4.2. Processes of knowledge creation and sharing The results from the interviews indicate that the consultants collected most of the information they needed and created necessary knowledge by themselves. The most common ways of searching for specific information was to search the internet, to use application ‘Read-me files’ and manuals as well as encyclopaedias. These unplanned ad hoc learning and knowledge creation activities were relatively unstructured and can be characterised by high degree of informality. As well as being one of the primary media for learning, several consultants named the internet as the first choice when searching for facts. The consultants also engaged in semiformal learning activities, such as self studies conducted in the office laboratory, at home by the computer or using books, journals and the internet. These activities often had relatively specific purposes and were most often conducted after normal working hours. The consultants stressed the fact that it was a time-consuming task to do most of the learning hence knowledge creation alone. Often they suspected that someone else were able to share the information they needed. Given

the distributed nature of the working arrangements, they were, however, not sure how and where to locate that person. Given the individualistic perspective on knowledge creation present at Epsilon, it also seemed as though the consultants preferred spending time searching the internet for the relevant information instead of looking for a colleague who might be able to contribute. They expressed the desire to make the internet search process itself more collective by sharing internet resources across departments. The issue here is more one of indexes to information than the information itself. “There are many people with priceless hyperlinks that you get hold of after having spent a lot of time searching for the information.”

The consultants were mainly aware of the areas of competence of consultants within their own department. New employees working alone in the field spent a considerable amount of time and effort learning about their colleagues, their competence, areas of expertise, as well as when and where they could be reached in order to start more effective knowledge creation and sharing processes. Despite a keen interest on the part of the organisation to support the sharing of knowledge especially from the experienced consultants, there were very few opportunities to do so. As a result, individual consultants maintained their own repositories. They saw it as their individual task to locate and index the knowledge through direct interaction with colleagues.

5. Analysis and implications for design The organisations that were studied can both be characterised as knowledge intensive firms, directed towards knowledge intensive production processes. In this context it becomes more and more important to take care of and support the employee’s maintenance and development of knowledge. In exploring the mechanisms concerning information and knowledge management we expose the need for technologies that support this management. Some general implications are to support and enhance the human interaction and knowledge sharing processes. The specific usage of web-based technology gives the possibilities of putting crucial, knowledge-related interaction online. By specifying these needs for such a system, a good base for designing a prototype is formed. To summarise the main findings from these field studies we can say that important hyperlinks were used in quite a common manner: i) to learn about a specific topic, ii) to solve a specific problem, iii) to interact with other people and forums. This result points to the fact that the search activity is very important but at the same time very time-consuming and is made redundant among a group of co-workers. In order to create knowledge, an acquisition process is needed. Technologies should support environmental scanning and information acquisition. The specific requirement of putting crucial external information and knowledge on-line is obvious. Another design implication is related to the accessibility of the system. Considering the dispersed groupworking the system should be accessible independent of where the user currently is located. Furthermore, the effort that is required to add information and share knowledge should be minimal in a way that the functionality of the system should not increase the work effort. Support for an extensive conceptual scheme, a categorisation for indexing and classifying knowledge, should be provided. In order to support the communication process functionality is further needed for establishing knowledge networks like discussion forum and email lists that put experts together. In such systems interdependent actors can exchange opinions as

well as receive advice and comments. Experiences from and feedback on working methods or outcomes from specific problem-solving scenarios should also be supported effectively. What was found more specifically was that knowledge workers expressed a wish for possibilities to benefit from each other’s experiences in the daily work practice. Such possibilities would assist in their often short term need for timely information without having to spend unnecessary overhead retrieving and compiling information. There was a call for systems that could accommodate these realities and support richer interaction and collaboration. Development of such a system would facilitate community building and continuous learning for ICT consultants working in a distributed manner and under constant time pressure to create, acquire and share new knowledge. The study also indicated that actors accessing shared information are often interested in references to other actors having knowledge about a certain field than in factual information or knowledge. This need refers to the requirement of communication channels. Actors both inside and outside of the knowledge team constitute a network of knowledge workers (the collaborative work arrangement) that must be able to share knowledge in a direct communicative way. In order to support the direct interaction among knowledge workers our design idea is built upon the assumption that people also want to communicate, not only interact with link collections. The empirical data identifies the need to locate and through communication use the competence of the co-workers and their collected and shared information, as an obvious point of departure for design aimed at enhancing learning processes. Using signatures and email-lists that can be added to the bookmark collection should support more specifically this. In order to meet the specific needs in the field study and the general requirements described in the literature we can summarise that ICT support should include both knowledge archives (such as link collections), and communication channels (such as email contacts).

6. The KnowMan Application 6.1. Technical description KnowMan is built on a platform based on Microsoft IIS and the most common scripting languages such as ASP, dhtml and JavaScript. The information is stored in an MS Access database and is retrieved and stored by simple SQL statements. To use KnowMan the user need a standard browser and internet access. From this perspective KnowMan can be divided into two parts; one contributor part and one sharing part. To contribute to the application the user can access KnowMan by one click on an added link in the browser's Personal Toolbar (Netscape Communicator) or Links Toolbar (Internet Explorer). This link opens a JavaScript browser pop-up window with an html-form. The form consists of six fields where the JavaScript populates the first two fields, with the title of the page and the URL which both are editable. The next fields are two dropdown menus populated by the database with the functionality to typify and categorise the URL. A comment field and a signature field, which is populated by a cookie, is the last set. The cookie that populates the signature field is set the first time the user enters KnowMan. The signature is stored together with the user e-mail address.

6.2. Using KnowMan The idea of KnowMan is a fast and simple way to share bookmarks in a group of coworkers. The bookmark repository in KnowMan can not continuously be filled and maintained manually by the individual knowledge worker. Instead, there is a design idea aiming at self-evident, on-the-fly acquisition of bookmarks and other kind of knowledge pieces from all of the co-workers in a shared workspace. The automated and simplistic way of collecting bookmarks "on-the-fly" is supported by carefully designed co-operative user interfaces applying easy-to-use principles. All the information collected is stored in a database, from which flexible reports can be generated. Browsing facilities are available through the dynamic catalogue structure, that can be further explored as the categories and types are generated from the database as well. The graphical design and the hypertext links of a web page make it easy to create an appealing forum for communicating complex information to a group and also get feedback comments. The over all idea of KnowMan will be a kind of a “memory-jogger” and an “interaction-trigger” rather than a “definite answer to everything”. 6.2.1.

Adding and Contributing

To reach and make KnowMan functional you more specifically need to drag-and-drop a link from the first page of the KnowMan homepage to the link field into the browser’s toolbar. This link contains the address to the popup window. It is also possible to dragand-drop the KnowMan homepage address to the same place, to faster reach this page and see all the links that are registered. Whenever clicking the link the KnowMan popup window will be activated. First time users need to register to be able to add and share any bookmarks. In this procedure (fig. 1) the user writes nickname and email address under the heading “new users”. If the user is already registered, but sitting in front of another browser, he/she only need to login in to KnowMan by writing email address into the field under the heading “existing users”.

Figure 1: Register pop-up

Figure 2: KnowMan pop-up window Adding a link to KnowMan, requires the user to press the link and the pop-up window will appear (fig. 2). In this small window six fields appear; Title and URL is already prefilled with information from the web page. The next two fields are drop-down menus, which have text, generated from the database. These two drop-down menus categorise the URL. In the first field the user choose a category, which refers to the subject area that the working group from the beginning has agreed upon. Then the user chooses type for the URL (e.g. news, forums, code, scientific papers, etc). This part is a very important step, to choose suitable category and type for the link, facilitate the navigation for the consumer seeking links in a later stage. Further on the pop-up window has a comment field, for commenting the URL. The last field is the nickname, which is automatically filled with your nickname. When pressing the Add button the URL is stored into the KnowMan database and the window will be minimised. 6.2.2.

Sharing and Viewing

When viewing the URL collection and get tips about new pages, the users go to the KnowMan homepage.

Figure 3: KnowMan web page – view links The consumer of information enters the KnowMan web page (for instance by clicking the added link in the browser) and is confronted with different categories from where he or she can choose to order URL's by for instance category or author. In the left frame all the categories and types are shown and in the main window an additional description of categories and types, and also the user manual includes the link with the address to the KnowMan popup window. When the consumer has chosen a category, a list of types is dropped down. These types are the same for all categories and divide each category in smaller groups. When URL’s are fetched from the database and listed in the main window with connected information (fig. 3), the consumer has four options, click on the link, view comments about the link, add comments to the link or view author contact information. In this stage the consumer can choose to add a comment to the URL by pressing the Add comment-link. The URL will automatically be presented together with the user signature. 6.2.3.

Knowing and Communicating

Another feature in KnowMan is a possibility for the user to choose between different style sheets and thereby personalise KnowMan with the favourite colours. Further on there are functions to see Who is registered? and Last ten postings. The first one shows

nicknames and emails to all registered users and a smiley revealing the number of added URL's per user (fig. 4). The more URL's the happier smiley. Here the consumer has two options, by pressing on the nickname all links that a certain person has put into KnowMan will show, and by pressing the email address the person at hand is reachable by email. The second function gives a view of the last ten postings with the same interface as the view of other links with the same possibilities to add more comments and see other comments. Yet another feature is the possibility to order the links by types only, without any concern about category.

Figure 4: Shows a list of them who is registered

6.3. Pre-assessing the usability When assesing the usability of KnowMan we have applied concepts from ”Form-fill-in design guidelines” (Schneiderman, 1998) and Nielsen’s ”Top ten mistakes in web

design” (Nielsen, 1996). We have chosen to apply some parts of their recommendations and ended up with a useful checklist, which is now used as headings in the following preassessment. • • •

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•

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• • • • • • •

Meaningful title: The title ”KnowMan – share your links!” identifies what the application is all about in a appropriate way. Consequent terminology and abbreviations: the terminology is used consequently but there are abbreviations that need to be explained. For this aim we can use the feature of “mouse over” more efficiently. Instructions that are easy to understand: The first page contents easy instructions for how to activate the application. But there is no overall description of how to use it. It has as such a quite intuitive design, which would have been even more understandable if there had been a coherent and more detailed “manual”. Logical grouped and sequenced fields: on the web page there is now two types of groupings; one that include both type and category, and another that only shows type. There is a lack of explanation that could be solved by using mouse over. In the pop up window there are five fields which all are in a natural order of sequence. However, they are not grouped. Ther is a relationship between title and URL as well as between Category and Type. These should be grouped (a line) according to that and the Comment field could be the more full text field at the bottom, as it is. Visual overview of entry fields: The user should be able to see the whole field when entering or modifying data in the pop up window. That is not the case, some fields are truncated in a poor way. The user should also be able to see the full text printed in the field. Navigation Support: The navigation could be better. Some colours and formatting styles are used in order to visualise where you are. The standard navigation tool bar can also be used. But in order to complement this, the use of bread crumbs is to recommend; e.g. knowman>>internet/multimedia>>misc. Error management and prevention: The error management is good. Editing is allowed directly in the fields of the pop up window. URL and title are automatically filled in which prevents user error when entering data. The user cannot spell the wrong category or type as those fields have combo boxes to choose pre-defined values from. Required and optional fields: Required and optional fields must be indicated. A warning message appears if the user does not fill in all fields. Labelled and explaining field texts: This is missing, which has to to with the overall lack of instructions and help texts. See above mentioned! Feedback and commitment: When adding a link to the database there is no commitment of having done so. The user need to get feedback on this activity. Standardised link colours: Link colours are used but not in a standardised way. Use blue for not visited links and red for already visited. Long scrolling pages: The first web page is long. Suggestions are to use anchors or separate links where further information can be found. Outdated information: The user does not get to know how old the links are. A good measure of accuracy is to add a date field, showing when the link has been added. There should also be a control mechanism testing that the links are still working. Over all impression: An application with potential, but need to be developed further in order to be user-friendly and functional. Explaining texts, navigation indicators,

and feedback functions would be complemented.

7. Discussion The empirical data from our studies strongly suggests a need for highly automated systems to reduce the workload for the user and support them rather than steeling their valuable time. In knowledge-intensive firms, time is of great importance why complex solutions, with an extensive administration need, run the risk of failure. It may be hard to find a good link when it is needed but KnowMan collects the knowledge from several people and can fasten the work for the knowledge worker. Combining the results from the field studies with the conclusions derived from the studies of Orlikowski (1992) and Robertson et al (1998) this also guides us in a direction away from complex and sophisticated groupware (Notes) towards more simplistic and automated solutions. KnowMan is made to be easy and fast to work with, an on-the-fly management of knowledge. Beyond being an excellent tool to ensure implementation of knowledge management initiatives this application serves as an important tool in the daily practice of groups of knowledge workers. The application provides a pop-up window in which to add URL:s, the personal information and comments about the URL. There is a flexible reporting as well as easy commenting capability, where annotation of certain bookmarks is valuable knowledge that can be further explored by people who have never been at the URL before. One important issue is that we do argue for personal and contact information such as names, signatures and email information put into the database. It is also an important feature that a person and her or his added URL’s are connected, in order to locate and identify persons with common interests and knowledge as your self. Furthermore, implicit knowledge transformation needs socialisation, which means interaction between people. As according to Van Heijst et al (1998), the distribution process of tacit knowledge is thus limited to identify the person who has the particular knowledge and encourage her or him to interact with the person in question. In, for example, Answer Garden experts are informed when a new question is added (by email) while users are not (Rodden, 1993). On the other hand, field studies show that some users asking questions to experts think of bothering them. “The one inhibition I felt using Answer Garden [was] knowing that the experts were typically busy and working on projects more important than my little…” (Ackerman 1994, p 251).

In this sense Answer Garden actually exacerbate it. Seen from organisational perspective experts are not obliged to maintain the organisational knowledge by using the systems. However, knowing which person is particularly interested in what areas, or rather needs to talk to an expert, would be truly recognised as an activity undertaken by a knowledge worker. This was also the conclusion found in Carstensen & Wulf (1996). Particularly, it should enable workers to send messages to either a certain individual or to groups of individuals. One such advancing attempt is called knowledge mapping or charting (Jordan, et al, 1998), (Glance et al, 1998) and this is also a kind of feature that KnowMan attempts to support. Being a forum where people can interact and communicate through sharing bookmarks with each other it also owns the possibility to send an email to the person that

has put the link into KnowMan. In order to make people communicate some personal and background information may help. For instance, by knowing the entry rates may imply more reliability among the users and increase the willingness to collaborate. Concerning the classification structure, it is better for a limited type of users with the same interest understanding and using the structure. If there are a wide perspective of people with different interest it is harder to find good categories that everybody can understand and use in a common way. As such, we have designed a structure that is flexible in away that it is dynamically generated from a database, where it always can be changed in order to match the structure of the specific user group. To summarise the specific features of KnowMan we have listed the advantages and disadvantages, based upon the initial use and pre-assessment, in Table 1. Advantages Easy to submit pieces of knowledge into the link collection. Easy for individual workers to access the knowledge in the common workspace KnowMan is designed for limited type of user groups with homogeneous interest and understanding. Easy to add and understand personal- and meta-information in the structure Easy for workers to decide which of the coworkers would have the knowledge needed for a particular work activity or who would have interest in certain pieces of knowledge. Easy to overview the catalogue structure in the repository.

Disadvantages Will not be used if the users are passive, incentive problems. There is no search engine, to search on different kinds of words. Not appropriate for large group of people with different kinds of interests. There is a lack of explanations of how to fill in the fields and how to classify the links. The system must be used collaboratively, by more than one person, otherwise it will not make any advantages for the users. The navigation in KnowMan lack a bit

The individual efforts of searching the same information will not be made redundant. KnowMan has a good error handling. It prevents error input and there is a possibility to edit and change text in pre-filled fields. Table 1. First findings of advantages and disadvantages in the KnowMan. In general, we argue that in order to make such a system work, it requires that it is used by more than one person. Again the nature of collaboration must ”be there” so the users are convinced of the usefulness of the system, already in the implementation phase. When the users are getting used to it and realised its advantages, there is usually no need for further motivation. Hopefully, the system is smoothly integrated into their daily work and they understand its personal benefit as well as the system ability to support communication and community building. Regarding the social aspects and communities, the user must have possibilities of getting to know ”the others” (van Heijst, et al, 1998, Glance et al, 1998). So that is why we argue that the little application in KnowMan might generate big side effects, designated to support many knowledge workers in their practice of knowledge work.

8. Conclusion and future work In this study we have analysed two case studies from knowledge intensive work groups, analysed certain implications for design and started to build a web based application. The application, KnowMan, was aimed to support dispersed, collaborating groups of individuals when searching information and sharing knowledge. KnowMan owns certain functionality, although a subset, that our cases clearly called for; bookmark sharing. People and URL information is collected into a common workspace while the tool is built upon a quick and easy use. Furthermore, we think that using KnowMan helps strengthening the feeling of identity among the group members. We have argued that small and simplistic applications have greater possibilities to success than huge complex knowledge system implementations have. The next productive steps forward would be to implement the prototype and start investigating for developing the prototype further. Our plan is to test and evaluate its use in one of the organisations in which the idea and requirements are derived from and to use these evaluation scenarios as input for more detailed design work. Other functionality of KnowMan can be developed to do much more intelligent and complex tasks. For instance, email reminders might be generated when a new link is put into KnowMan while more information about the user could let the system know the user profile and generate a more user specific reminder based on such a profile. Advanced search engines in which to find a certain word or subject would be complemented. Furthermore, with neural network logic in the background, KnowMan could by itself categorise different URL:s to different folders. The kind of active searching provided by agents might also be considered.

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