Evaluating Collaborative Applications from a Knowledge Management Approach

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Evaluating Collaborative Applications from a
Knowledge Management Approach

• Aurora Vizcaíno, Mario Piattini,
• Manuel Martínez, Gabriela Aranda
• University of Castilla-la Mancha

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Contents

• Knowledge Management
• Collaborative Systems
• Our Proposal
• Conclusions and future work

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Importance of KM

• KM is receiving considerable attention from
  practitioners and academics
• Knowledge is an organizational asset that
  enables sustentainable competitive advantage in
  hypercompetitive enviroments

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Knowledge and Flows of Knowledge

• Knowledge is seldom managed and stored
  automatically and systematically
• The companies which manages their knowledge are
  more competitive.
• Knowledge can be explicit or tacit.

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Explicit or Tacit Knowledge

• Explicit knowledge is easy to share and
  formalise.
• Tacit knowledge is more personal and difficult to
  formalise, being harder to communicate and share
  with others.

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Knowledge Flows
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When knowledge does not flow correctly

• Hubs
• Black Holes
• Springs
• Missing links

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Evaluation of Collaborative Systems
Focus of the evaluation

• Organizational impact/impact on work practices
• End product
• Efficiency of task performance using software
• User satisfaction with the software

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Evaluation...

• Task support provided by the software
• Specific features of the groupware interface
• Patterns of system use
• User interaction while using the software

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More techniques approaches

• A frame divided into four levels requirements,
  capability, service and technology
• Evaluating the quality of the output, the number
  of people and time spent on the overall task and
  the total work done
• Innovation diffusion theory

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Our Proposal

• Collaborative tools have frequently been
  evaluated in terms of their usability
• The usability of a system can be defined as the
  capability of a product to be used easily. It is
  also one of the six main software quality
  characteristics presented in ISO standard 9126

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Our Proposal

• Evaluating collaborative systems from the point
  of view of knowledge
• Trough knowledge flows.

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How to measure the Degree of Knowledge Management

• Knowledge Management Perfomance Index (KMPI),
  five components
• Knowledge creation
• Knowledge accumulation
• Knowledge sharing
• Knowledge utilization
• Knowledge internalization

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Knowledge Creation

• When new information is obtained and understood.
• Does the tool help to find and understand
  information?
• Does the system propose solutions to problems?

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Knowledge Accumulation

• It is important that a collaborative system tries
  to learn what is the client's daily and
  automatically stores useful information.
• Does the tool have a database where the
  information can be stored?
• Does the tool have an intelligent mechanism to
  capture information?

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Knowledge Sharing

• It would be interesting for the tools to have
  mechanisms to communicate with other people to
  locate experts and to detect who is working on
  similar tasks in proposing communities of
  practice.

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Sharing

• Does the tool have a mechanism to track the
  communities of practices work?
• Does the tool have a mechanism to detect which
  person may know about a topic that another person
  needs information about?

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Knowledge Utilization

• This depends on two constructs
• Degree of knowledge utilization in an
  organization
• Knowledge utilization culture.
• Having a system that automatically searches for
  information helps to reuse it.

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Knowledge Utilization

• Does the system have techniques to search, for
  and avoid noise in the information?
• Does the system recommend the best way to perform
  a task?

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Knowledge Internalisation

• Knowledge internalisation is related to three
  constructs
• Capability to internalise task-related knowledge
• Educational opportunity
• Level of organization learning

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Knowledge Internalisation

• Does the system help to learn how to perform a
  task?
• Does the system have a mechanism to improve the
  employees abilities?
• Does the system have techniques to teach
  organizational philosophy, standards, and the
  clients profile?

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Knowledge Integration

• The tool facilitates the integration and uniform
  representation of the semantic of common
  workspaces.
• Does the system facilitate the integration of the
  information and knowledge?

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Conclusions and future work

• Collaborative tools help to manage knowledge.
  Because of this, these tools should be evaluated
  rby taking this fact into account
• Future work to evaluate several known tools
  focused on knowledge management.
• We think that developing useful metrics is the
  key to successful evaluation.
• Goal Question Metrics