Future research in KMS Huge potential… forever? How can you avoid over-promising? Organizations & culture must change in concert with KMS - A changed organization still has to function within the world People are hard to understand - Idiosyncratic behaviors - Rationality & profitability Entrepreneurial vs. Administrative functions

What’s the Future of KM? Davenport, 10 years later - Did Lotus Note & the Web merge? - Agents- no, keywords searches - yes! KM as Mgmt Enthusiasm “categorization and organization of knowledge will be a core competence for every firm” - Importance, vocabulary & tools for access Ensuring that K gets transferred Enabling conversations (relationships) b/t creators & users

Networked K Organization Everything is or has a network Organizing knowledge across cultures Multiple facets of knowledge - Viewing - Representing (ontologies) Does more digital knowledge = more potential for KM?

Information Tech & KMS Is well-conceived & used IT really KMS? IT provides a lot of leverage to find, extract & use knowledge - More work or smarter work? - Replacing technologies, not improving work Information Junkyards - Volume vs. Findability & Actionability Extending our reach - CMC - , blogs, social networks - Real time & distributed time

Changing what Knowledge means? Knowing is a human act Knowledge is the residue of thinking Knowledge is created in the present moment Knowledge belongs to communities Knowledge circulates throgh communities in many ways New Knowledge is created at the boundaries of old Leveraging knowledge involves a combination of people & IT McDermott, p3

How should we use IT? Speed up the coordination - Forms, agendas, bureaucracy Extend collaboration - Structures to support each other - Dynamic help for knowledge creation Work with existing terms & practices - Just make them better, not different - One size does not fit all Culture changes for groups & individuals

Does IT Matter? Productivity has improved, but not consistently or definitively Organizations have changed, but not much? An increase in competitiveness, understanding or innovation? Doesn’t everyone have this “advantage” now? Has IT changed organizational strategy? - Tactics have changed, but in simple ways - Cultural expectations have not changed IT keeps changing into help solving the NEXT problem - You can’t stop using it to see effects - Constant upgrades = time + $$$

Navigating Social Cyberspaces Understanding Usenet use - Postings Why How Information - Distribution Cross postings Specific groups & cultures - Free-riders vs. Contributors - Usenet readers

Social Cyberspace Dimensions Netscan – social accounting metrics - Size of group - Culture - Social cues Messaging protocols - Asynchronous - Real time (IM) Discussion Engagement - Frequency, Replies - Date, Time Thread and Author Tracker - Thread Visualization - New Threads vs. Replying to Old

Blogs & Social Dimensions Are blogs taking the place of newsgroups? RSS Readers Topic discovery methods - Blog rolls - Search engines - Links Issues of Awareness Posting technologies s. Usenet

Answer Garden A shared organizational memory system Storing, retrieving and viewing information What methods worked best? What about user paricipation? What’s an optimal size?

Agents & Agency What do we mean by agents? - Science Fiction? - Physical or Virtual? Are agents just a metaphor? By defining agents are we defining intelligence? - Replacing people with agents - Replacing systems with agents Agents force us to discover & address tacit knowledge (experience) in knowledge work

Agents are here

That’s agents, not robots

What kinds of agents are there? Intelligent Agents - Show “intelligence” in interacting with the environment - Act based on previous facts or rules - Make leaps of intuition - Do things for you Autonomous Agents - Interact with the environment - Stimulus & response, not always rules - Can perform a wider range of activities over time - Do things we do not or can not do

Agents & Angels Agents as help to manage information Agents also are creating lots of new data Possible uses - Managing our social life - Replace conventional organizations - Helping us find things (web crawlers) - Performing repetitive information tasks A human face on information tasks? - Jeeves, Watson, Sherlock, Eliza, the Wizard - Pushes our interaction into something more “natural”

Agents or Angels? Who manages the agents? When is a decision made? - Upon arrival of the information - After information is compared - Blink vs. DeepThought Is it possible to make our information use behavior transparent? - Is it flattering? - What if we find too much information? Enabling more knowledge work or just more work? - Speed vs. Accuracy

Ranks of Agents Information Brokering - Networks & the Web - Search & Overload Management Product Brokering - Shopping (Buying?) - Recommendations / Collaborative Filtering Merchant Brokering - Personalization, Customer “service” - Logical, naïve decisions & gaming Negotiating - Multi-part decisions - Conversation?

How agents should work - Observe interface actions & act - Run “in the background” to - Manipulate information (& the interface) for you Why this personalized view of agent interactions? - Understanding one person is difficult enough - Group interactions require making relationships explicit

Reducing Info Overload = KM? Most apt use of agents in the last 10 years - Might be creating more information for us to manage - Increases explicit knowledge,but tacit? We need agents to help do things in real time, without our intervention The Web & agents are a good match Understanding behavior & training agents - Watching, examples, (others) profiles - Not filtering as much as ordering Might be most interesting to see others’ agents, not your own

The Big Question(s) How can KMS help people coordinate, discover & organize information and knowledge? How can intranets, groupware, weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, search engines, PIMs & in both individual and organizational contexts help us manage knowledge? Are certain types of KMS suitable for certain types of tasks, groups or roles?