Emerging Technologies & Knowledge Management Jonathan Grudin research.microsoft.com/~jgrudin The Information School of the University of Washington

Emerging Technologies&

Knowledge Management Jonathan Grudin

research.microsoft.com/~jgrudin

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Emerging Technologies& Knowledge Management

• A view of the larger context

• Knowledge in 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

Next Generation to Enter Organizations

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 distrust:Chit-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 distrust:Chit-chat? ROI?– Will be mission-critical!

was evolving

and today

A Tale of Two Technologies

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

Research

1. 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

2. Surveying MS attitudes, behaviors (w. Gina Venolia)

– 1000 people randomly selected from address book

– Now conducting 4th at 8 month intervals

3. This analysis of KM & emerging technologies

Semi-formal Informal

Team

Individual

Employee Weblogs at Microsoft

• 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

With Lilia Efimova

Semi -formal Informal

Team

Individual

Product Blogs

Weblog Awareness and Activity at MS

Feb 2004 Oct. 2004 June 2005 Feb 2006

What Are Weblogs Good For?

1 2 3 4 5

Writer

Reader

Non-reader

useful for personal pursuitsfunuseful for communicating with customersuseful for communicating within an organisation

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 hasn’t succeeded

► Search technologies, browsing skills will focus








• User-generated metadata

• Very lightweight

• Immediately visible to others

• Example:flickr photo server– Free personal photo

store accessible from anywhere

Unstructured Tagging

• User-generated metadata

• Very lightweight

• Immediately visible to others

• Question: How far can a bottom-up approach go?


• 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?”









A student weblog An internal corporate weblog

Examples of Weblogs

• 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

Typical Characteristics

Web UI

ClientApp

BlogServer

WebBrowser

Technoratiweblogs.com

Google

Daypopetc.

BlogServer

Robert Scoble’s

“Five Pillars of

Conversational Software”

Robert Scoble’s

“Five Pillars of

Conversational Software”

1. Easy to publish1. Easy to publish

2. Discoverable2. Discoverable

3. Reveal social patterns

3. Reveal social patterns

4. Permalinks4. Permalinks 5. Syndication5. Syndication

How Blogs Work

Thanks to Gina Venolia

Aggre-gator

rss

• 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

Weblogs and the Workplace

Document Repositories

• Often ambiguous—lacks a read-me file

• Document context often emailed, not readily available later

• Another analogy: commenting code to provide context

Project Blog

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.

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?

Wikis

• Multiple authors may edit each other’s text

• Version history allows monitoring, restoration

• Advantages

– Lightweight, accessible

– Division of labor

• Disadvantages

– Less incentive, Prisoner’s Dilemma

– More planning, management

• Good for deadline-driven collaborations

Wikipedia








Expert Locator Hasn’t 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

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

Emerging Technologies&

Knowledge Management Jonathan Grudin

research.microsoft.com/~jgrudin

Th

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of t

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