Recommender systems have established mostly in e-commerce, whereas in companies or scientific institutions the recommendation of experts und possible colleagues has yet been discussed mostly theoretically. We propose a recommender system on the basis of Social Bookmarking Systems and Folksonomies, which may help to find communities of practice, where people share the same interests and support each other in their working or scientific field. The paper reports research in knowledge management and information retrieval, and therefore offers new insights and fields of studies in information science.
Knowledge sharing in communities has attracted much attention in the field of knowledge management in research and practice. In this paper we outline a view where the community lifecycle is supported at different stages. The central component of our framework is the community ontology SWRC+COIN that describes the typical structure of communities. We exemplarily show how communities in the academic domain can be detected automatically by means of analyzing information flow in a bibliographic Peer-to-Peer system and how the instantiated community knowledge base can be exploited to support cooperative work in the communities.
Several of the Communities of Practices (CoP) Alterra/Wing manages have reached their mid-life. Designed CoPs have come to life and have achieved alignment, from which we can learn. A growing interest can be signalised in using CoPs as management instruments and in governance. Governments are seeking new ways in policy making and new steering instruments. Using the case of agrologistics we describe how the Dutch government has used a CoP for complex planning and organizational problems. The social design, planning and management of a new CoP have linked together a wide range of stakeholders to establish a operational CoP. Alignment is a key factor in this transition to self-steering; the value of belonging is very powerful. Masters play an important role in setting up and in steering the CoP. CoPs can be developed as new instruments of governance, based on the theoretical concept of CoP.
This paper concerns the need for methodological support in providing Knowledge Management (KM) IT solutions. Due to the distributed nature of knowledge, the support of KM often requires complex, distributed IT systems, which are inherently difficult to design. We propose an agent-oriented methodology based on Tropos for the analysis and design of KM systems that offers appropriate abstractions for modeling and designing the characteristics of the organizational setting of the system. The method is illustrated using a fictitious scenario where a newcomer in a knowledge organization decides to join an existing Community of Practice (CoP) in order to share knowledge and adjust to his new working environment.
In this paper, adopting a structurationist perspective on technology, we explore the relationship between organizational forms and ICTs when the “matter” to deal with is knowledge production and innovation. The reason why such focus is relevant is twofold. On the one hand it has been widely underlined the importance of knowledge as strategic asset [Stewart 97]. On the other, is because we believe that many KM technology investments haven’t generate the expected results and benefits [Davenport 00]. A structuration theory reading of KM technologies could provide a lens in order to draw some interesting explanations on some problematic aspects of KM implementations and, moreover, on some interesting prescriptions on how future implementations should be approached.
In many organisations, conservation of specialised expertise is picked out as a central theme only after experienced members have already left. The paper presents the SELaKT method, a method for Sustainable Expert Localisation and Knowledge Transfer based on social network analysis (SNA). It has been developed during a project co-operation between the Department of Information Science at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Free University Berlin, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK, Berlin. The SELaKT method uses recent insights into network analysis and pragmatically adapts SNA to suit organisational practice. Thus it provides a strategic tool to localise experts, to identify knowledge communities and to analyse the structure of knowledge flows within and between organisations. The SELaKT method shows its advances and increasing relevance for practical use by integration of specific organisational conditions and requirements into the process of analysis.
Creating online communities involves much more than creating software. Software houses online community activities but social interactions also depend on who is involved, what their goals are, personalities and policies. By paying attention to these sociability issues, community developers, managers and leaders can influence how a community develops. For instance, they can facilitate policies that engender sound social norms and increase social capital. This paper identifies some of the ingredients for social capital development in Communities of Practice (COP) and outlines the components of a a framework for future research.
This paper presents an approach to supporting the exchange of knowledge in communities of practice that connect experts from different fields of expertise. The developed system allows unobtrusive construction of personalised knowledge maps that capture implicit knowledge of individuals and groups of users and make it usable for collaborative structuring of shared information repositories. The personalised maps also reflect the global patterns of knowledge exchange in the community which allows the extraction of a shared conceptual structure that connects knowledge across different individuals and groups of users. To this end techniques for self-organised clustering are combined with methods for supervised learning and collaborative filtering. Application scenarios include automatic generation of personalised knowledge portals, collaborative knowledge management and the construction of shared ontologies and topic networks. The real-world testbed is the Internet platfom netzspannung.org.
Case Studies into the CoP Theory-Practice Gap
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are among the most promising concepts to promote the genesis, evolution and exchange of knowledge in organisations. However, there is a gap between CoP theories and their implementation in companies. Our case studies of four attempts to introduce CoP-related structures show that the different management principles lying behind can systematically be analysed in at least two dimensions, technology “vs.” the social and exchange “vs.” production. We argue that the choice is not contingent, but that an emphasis on the social and the creative production of new knowledge leads to more productive structures in the area and in the sense of knowledge intensive services.
KM is more an archipelago of theories and practices rather than a monolithic approach. We propose a conceptual map that organizes some major approaches to KM according to their assumptions on the nature of knowledge. The paper introduces the two major views on knowledge –objectivist, subjectivist – and explodes each of them into two major approaches to KM: knowledge as a market, and knowledge as intellectual capital (the objectivistic perspective); knowledge as mental models, and knowledge as practice (the subjectivist perspective). We argue that the dichotomy between objective and subjective approaches is intrinsic to KM within complex organizations, as each side of the dichotomy responds to different, and often conflicting, needs: on the one hand, the need to maximize the value of knowledge through its replication; on the other hand, the need to keep knowledge appropriate to an increasingly complex and changing environment. Moreover, as a proposal for a deeper discussion, such trade-off will be suggested as the origin of other relevant KM related trade-offs that will be listed. Managing these trade-offs will be proposed as a main challenge of KM.
Professional Service Firms (PSF) from the consulting, accounting or law industry represent a prototype of the so called knowledge intensive organization. Knowledge plays a central role in many business processes of a PSF on the input as well as on the output side. Expertise and knowledge is what they seem to sell to their clients and it is the fuel that keeps their internal decision and action machine running. However, a lot of research on knowledge in organizations tends to over-emphasize the role of knowledge as a means for making rational decisions. Writers of this perspective view knowledge as an asset and their primary focus is on how new knowledge is being generated, how tacit knowledge can be turned into explicit knowledge, how knowledge can be captured, stored and best be dissiminated. Knowledge, goes the argument, helps to understand the world, to adapt in a changing environment and to make informed judgements. The higher the speed at which organizations learn, the more knowledge and information flows through an organization, the more new ideas fuel internal processes, the better for the organization. While this perspective adopts a normative model of rationality and conceptualizes knowledge as an objectively definable commodity that leads to better decision making and in a real world, we propose a different point of view.
Central to an alternative perspective is the idea that action is the fundamental goal of business organizations. The need for action and operation calls organizations to reduce the complexity that is often generated by rational decision-making exercises. Paradox but true: uncertainty and doubt often increase as decision makers accumulate information in an attempt to get “the full picture”. From an action perspective knowledge can play its important role as an absorber of uncertainty and a provider of organizational legitimacy both intra-organizationally as well as externally only if it complies with a specific quality standard. Action-reinforcing knowledge must not be ambiguous in nature and it has to be valid and reliable in the sense that it is shared and reproduced among knowledgeable people who understand the rules for socially certifying knowledge. Centralization and control of the knowledge base(s) of an organization are in this perspective a rational means to reduce external complexity. Knowledge management is instrumental in coordinating action when it helps to systematically not adopt a normative model of rationality. In a complex world it cultivates a single perspective and the confidence it attaches to the knowledge used is excessive in relation to what would seem reasonable.
This paper describes experience gained in implementation of Knowledge Management models and instruments in a cross—organisational research setup. concretely in a case of Delft Cluster Knowledge Centre. The role of Knowledge Management and in particular of Communities of Practice in Delft Cluster is outlined, followed by an extended list of Lessons Learned.