Chang Yan Chi

The use of different information and communication technologies to support knowledge sharing in organizations: From e-mail to micro-blogging

Previous research has revealed the following three challenges for knowledge sharing: awareness of expertise distribution, motivation for sharing, and network ties. In this case study, we examine how different generations of information and communication technologies (ICTs), ranging from e‐mail to micro‐blogging, can help address these challenges. Twenty‐one interviews with employees from a multinational company revealed that although people think social media can better address these challenges than older tools, the full potential of social media for supporting knowledge sharing has yet to be achieved. When examining the interconnections among different ICTs, we found that employees′ choice of a combination of ICTs, as affected by their functional backgrounds, could create “technological divides” among them and separate resources. This finding indicates that having more ICTs is not necessarily better. ICT integration, as well as support for easy navigation, is crucial for effective knowledge search and sharing. Adaptation to local culture is also needed to ensure worldwide participation in knowledge sharing.

Dandelion: supporting coordinated, collaborative authoring in Wikis

Dandelion is a tool that extends wikis to support coordinated, collaborative authoring using a tag-based approach. Specifically, users can insert tags in a wiki page to specify various co-authoring tasks. These tags can then be executed to help drive and manage the collaboration workflow, and provide content-centric collaboration awareness for all the co-authors. Four successful pilot deployments and positive user feedback show the practical value of Dandelion, especially its value in supporting a structured, collaborative authoring process often seen in business settings.

Smarter social collaboration at IBM research

In this paper we feature a set of research projects done at several IBM Research laboratories across the world. The work featured here focuses on the topic of smart social collaboration, which studies, designs, and develops social collaboration principles and technologies that can help customize and enhance existing social collaboration tools to suit specific user needs, including cultural, business, and personal needs.

Using email to facilitate wiki-based coordinated, collaborative authoring

Dandelion is a wiki-based tool that supports coordinated, collaborative authoring. In this paper, we present an ex-tended version of Dandelion, which provides an email inter-face for users to accomplish their tasks by email in a coordinated, collaborative authoring process. Specifically, Dandelion employs a semi-structured, template-based approach that allows users to use templates to specify their requests in email. These emailed requests can be interpreted by Dandelion and are then used to automatically drive the collaboration flow. As part of its actions, Dandelion automatically creates a wiki page and dynamically updates it to record co-authoring tasks and collate co-authored content. As a result, users can use their familiar tool (email) to accomplish their tasks in a co-authoring process, while leveraging a wiki for additional benefits (e.g., obtaining collaboration awareness and formatting the text). Our preliminary study with two groups of users shows the usefulness of both Dandelion email and wiki features and their impact on collaboration effectiveness.

Integrating Twitter into Wiki to support informal awareness

In the current study, we explored Twitter as a useful and practical extension to a wiki-based collaborative work space. A two-week experiment and a survey study shed some light on the potential benefits of integrating Twitter, or other existing social networking tools with a formal collaborative work space in encouraging meta-data level communication and promoting informal awareness.