Emerging Technologies

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Emerging TechnologiesKnowledge Management
The Information School of the University of
Washington
Jonathan Grudinresearch.microsoft.com/jgrudin
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Emerging Technologies Knowledge Management

• A view of the larger context
• Knowledge in organizations

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Next Generation to Enter Organizations

• New technologies
• IM and text messaging
• Tagging
• Weblogs
• New Behaviors
• Multi-tasking
• Multimedia authoring
• Search-and-browse
• Parallels the generation that brought email and
  word processing into organizations

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A Tale of Two Technologies
and today
was evolving

• Email in 1984
• Used mostly by students
• Used by everyone
• Access limited to friends
• Accessible to everyone
• Clients not interoperable
• Complete interoperability
• Conversations ephemeral
• Conversations saved
• Chosen for informality
• Became the formal option
• Organizational distrustChit-chat? ROI?
• Mission-critical technology

• IM in 2004
• Used mostly by students
• Use spreading rapidly
• Access limited to friends
• Pressure to remove limits
• Clients not interoperable
• Pressure for interoperability
• Conversations ephemeral
• Recording is more common
• Chosen for informality
• Becoming more formal
• Organizational distrustChit-chat? ROI?
• Will be mission-critical!

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Enterprise Knowledge Management

• Asynchronous information sharing natural use of
  digital technology but getting beyond databases
  to KE KM elusive
• Involved in 5 efforts between 1984 and 2006
• Design rationale drew HCI researchers
• Key obstacles identified
• Promising emerging technologies unstructured
  tagging, weblogs, lightweight enterprise search

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Research

• Qualitative study of weblogs at MS (w. Lilia
  Efimova)
• Meetings, documents, DLs, weblogs, 39 interviews
  of bloggers, infrastructure support, senior legal
  PR, VPs, Sharepoint MSN planners
• Surveying MS attitudes, behaviors (w. Gina
  Venolia)
• 1000 people randomly selected from address book
• Now conducting 4th at 8 month intervals
• This analysis of KM emerging technologies

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Employee Weblogs at Microsoft
With Lilia Efimova

• Very dynamic area
• Employee activity greater and more varied than
  realized
• Variety of experiments by individuals and product
  groups
• Increasing sophistication of Legal, PR, execs
• Everywhere, evolution of behavior, attitudes

Semi
-
formal Informal
Team
Product Blogs
Individual
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Weblog Awareness and Activity at MS
Feb 2004 Oct. 2004 June 2005
Feb 2006
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What Are Weblogs Good For?
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Managing Knowledge Challenges Potential
Solutions

• Digital documents are difficult to find
• Adding metadata is work
• People disagree on labels
• ? Tagging lightweight, visible, bottom-up
  (flickr, del.icio.us)
• Is ontology overrated?
• Documents are difficult to assess
• Context missing
• ? Project weblogs linked to document repositories
• Like a project Read Me file, or comments on
  code
• So people bypass system
• Expertise locator software hasnt succeeded
• ? Search technologies, browsing skills will focus

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Managing Knowledge Challenges Potential
Solutions

• Digital documents are difficult to find
• Adding metadata is work
• People disagree on labels
• ? Tagging lightweight, visible, bottom-up
  (flickr, del.icio.us)
• Is ontology overrated?
• Documents are difficult to assess
• Context missing
• ? Project weblogs linked to document repositories
• Like a project Read Me file, or comments on
  code
• So people bypass system
• Expertise locator software hasnt succeeded
• ? Search technologies, browsing skills will focus

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Unstructured Tagging

• User-generated metadata
• Very lightweight
• Immediately visible to others
• Exampleflickr photo server
• Free personal photo store accessible from anywhere

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Unstructured Tagging

• User-generated metadata
• Very lightweight
• Immediately visible to others
• Question How far can a bottom-up approach go?

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Unstructured Tagging

• Personal benefits, ease of use, visibility of
  activity and choices, flexibility result in
  social benefits
• The alternative imposed hierarchal
  ontologies(e.g. Linnaean, Dewey Decimal, ISBN)
• More precise but heavyweight
• Require planning, administration, maintenance
• Further reading
• Clay Shirky, Ontology is Overrated
• Cory Doctorow, Metacrap
• David Hawking, Does Topic Metadata Help With Web
  Search?

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Managing Knowledge Challenges Potential
Solutions

• Digital documents are difficult to find
• Adding metadata is work
• People disagree on labels
• ? Tagging lightweight, visible, bottom-up
  (flickr, del.icio.us)
• Is ontology overrated?
• Documents are difficult to assess
• Context missing
• ? Project weblogs linked to document repositories
• Like a project Read Me file, or comments on
  code
• So people bypass system
• Expertise locator software hasnt succeeded
• ? Search technologies, browsing skills will focus

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Examples of Weblogs

• A student weblog An internal
  corporate weblog

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Typical Characteristics

• Website with entries ordered chronologically
• Single voice
• Authorship, audience, topics, and media vary
• Simple, fast, and often free
• Creation and hosting of blog, posting to blog
• Distribution through RSS and aggregators
• Tools and services for searching and monitoring
• Fostering discussion and interaction
• Blogrolls
• Comments
• Links, permalinks
• Trackbacks
• Referrer logs
• Watchlists
• Statistics

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How Blogs Work
Robert Scobles Five Pillars of Conversational
Software
2. Discoverable
1. Easy to publish
Web UI
Blog Server
Client App
3. Reveal social patterns
5. Syndication
4. Permalinks
Thanks to Gina Venolia
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Weblogs and the Workplace

• Categories of most weblogs today
• Public personal interactive diaries
• A-list bloggers on politics, technology,
  events, cool stuff
• Corporate use progression
• Incoming event coverage
• Incoming monitor comments on your products
• Externally-facing put human face on your
  enterprise, connect to customers
• Internally-facing approach to project visibility
  and knowledge management

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Document Repositories

• Often ambiguouslacks a read-me file
• Document context often emailed, not readily
  available later
• Another analogy commenting code to provide
  context

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Project Blog
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Project Blog

• Document repository blog or blog features
• Blog links to repository
• Blog entries briefly describe documents,
  reminders, status, etc. a single voice with
  multiple authors
• Discussions, debates carried out in email DL
  when worth preserving captured and put in
  repository with blog entry description
• It is easier to blog a comment than to email it.

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Chronological Other Structures

• Chronological sequencing
• Highly familiar, so we can reason about it
• Facilitates skimming
• What about information structured other ways to
  be more useful to managers and others?
• Placed in document repository
• Merger of blog, repository features likely
• What about wikis?

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Wikis

• Multiple authors may edit each others text
• Version history allows monitoring, restoration
• Advantages
• Lightweight, accessible
• Division of labor
• Disadvantages
• Less incentive, Prisoners Dilemma
• More planning, management
• Good for deadline-driven collaborations

Wikipedia
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Managing Knowledge Challenges Potential
Solutions

• Digital documents are difficult to find
• Adding metadata is work
• People disagree on labels
• ? Tagging lightweight, visible, bottom-up
  (flickr, del.icio.us)
• Is ontology overrated?
• Documents are difficult to assess
• Context missing
• ? Project weblogs linked to document repositories
• Like a project Read Me file, or comments on
  code
• So people bypass system
• Expertise locator software hasnt succeeded
• ? Search technologies, browsing skills will focus

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Expert Locator Hasnt Worked

• Incentives and social processes are complex
• With very high incentive it can work e.g., the
  Boeing Rapid Response Center locator
• Potential converging effects of search
  technologies
• Provide direct answer much more often
• Identify best knowledgeable person more often
• With fewer inappropriate queries more
  knowledgeable questioners, experts more willing
  to participate

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Conclusions

• Lightweight, social tools that make information
  highly visible expand possibilities for KM
  support
• Emerging rapidly, will flourish as students enter
  the workforce
• Social practices and technology remain to be
  worked out
• Unresolved questions, such as limits to bottom-up
  and collaborative organization

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Emerging TechnologiesKnowledge Management
The Information School of the University of
Washington
Jonathan Grudinresearch.microsoft.com/jgrudin