Takahiko Nomura

Interlocus: workspace configuration mechanisms for activity awareness

~i paper describes the concept of acttii~ awareness, which enables workspace awareness without employing shared workspaces, and our tiework for supporting activi~ awareness. Activity awareness extends the concept of asynchronous workspace awareness to provide asynchronous progress notifications and collective perspectives on related activities. Our framework adopts the tempody threaded workspace mode~ which tracks an activi~ in each individurd’s workspace by storing a sequence of snapshots of their workspace, and uses workspace cotignration mechanisms to provide awareness tictions. We den present hterlocus, an implementation of tie framework in the WWW environment Ke~ords shared workspace, awareness, common tiormation space, contextid Mormation sharing, World Wide Web INTRODUCTION As the ktemet ex?ends the sphere of communication over the network the concept of shared workspace has be=to engage pubfic attention [2,6,12,13]. htemet-based communication tools enable people to work in new and fletible ways. When working coUaboratively, people may not be close in space or organizational hierarchy. People can work at home without commuting to the office. ~ey can rdso work witi colleagues from other departments or even other companies. Further, it enables groups to take more dynamic forms, which leads to an organizational structure based on goal-oriented lightweight projects. Vi companies ofien have ti structure. Although emd and remote fiymg systems have been central figures in networked collaboration, shared workspaces have come into the Yietight because of their useti featies. me shared workspace is a concept from groupware systems that provides workers vvitha tial space in which Permission to make di~tal or hard copies of aUor part ofthis \\-orkfor personal or classroom use is granted vithout f& protided that copies zre not made or dis~%uted for profit or commercial ad~wtage and that copies bmr this notice and the fill titation on the first page. To copy othatis% to repubfish, to post on senrers or to redistribute to ~its, rquirs prior qtific permission and~ora f= I

Design of Ba for successful Knowledge Management how enterprises should design the places of interaction to gain competitive advantage

This paper represents the framework, based on the study results of practical benchmarking and assessment of Knowledge Management, for designing `Ba? where creative interaction generates. In organization, we can find various Ba, such as cyber space for Community of Practice to gather and open physical space for collaboration beyond divisions. Ba develops circulation of knowledge and which is the key to the improvement of competitive advantage of organization. When benchmarking was conducted to KM leading companies, we have found that the method of utilizing Ba was very logically adapted to the business strategy, which supported corporate culture for knowledge sharing. On the other hand, after assessing the workstyle of knowledge workers in detail, we have uncovered that although the style of knowledge work is different, the design of Ba for each department in a company is standardized and does not apply to the current situation. This is because, a guide for strategic design of Ba does not exist, even though the importance of Ba for interactions that go beyond organization is increasing, which is necessary for business that creates value added. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the design of Ba that applies to both knowledge strategy and the workstyle of each knowledge worker.

Temporally threaded workspace: a model for providing activity-based perspectives on document spaces

In this paper, activity-based especially in th Kanagawa 259-O 1, Japan : hayashi.koichi@fujixerox.co.jp we present a framework for providing perspectives of a document space, WWW. An activity-based perspective is a view of the subspace of the WWW document space that a knowledge worker should understand or modify while executing the activity. We designed the framework to reduce the cognitive overhead of managing document spaces dependent on various internal and external changes. Changes within the activity (often resulting from the natural progress of the activity) result in changes of focus in the subspace related to the activity. For such internal changes, we introduce a temporally-threaded workspace model. Our model introduces a structured workspace that maintains a thread of snapshots of a knowledge worker’s perspective on a document space. Such threads of snapshots are constructed by monitoring user actions. External changes (for example, changes to documents managed in external sites) are independent of the progress of users’ activities. To deal with these changes, we introduce a proxy mechanism to maintain documents in the same state as accessed. This paper also describes the implementation of prototype systems, in the WWW environment, based on our frameworks. Interlocus is a client/server system providing facilities based on the temporally-threaded workspace model. It provides a user interface that presents spatial-temporal views of a workspace thread. Packrat is a WWW proxy server that maintains documents in the same state as accessed.

Development of Methodology for Service Concept Creation

We are developing a methodology for service concept creation. Taking an approach consisting of four steps; observation (involvement in pilot projects), conceptualization, modeling, and deployment, we have clarified the basic concept of our methodology and designed a process for service concept creation. The process includes (1) sharing a vision of new services, (2) exploring customer values, and (3) creating a service concept consisting of target users (WHO), customer values (WHAT), and key technologies (HOW). In this paper we illustrate this process and propose methods designed to be used in the process by focusing on effective use of observation, story telling, and analogies for abductive reasoning in the step of searching for customer values.

Social Innovation Management with Resonant Individuals' Insights

So far, various innovation processes have been studied in the past, but the work style of organizational members is more important to continuously drive innovation, rather than the process itself. During the knowledge benchmarking program conducted in 2006, which theme was continuous innovation and organic growth, we compared best practice companies and participating companies of the research and discovered that their largest gap was communication among extraneous employees and the culture to challenge and allow failure. In other words, creating an organization which every member contributes to innovation leads to a greatest difference in the result that is beyond technological strategies. Through three years of benchmarking program of innovation companies, we have created the social innovation model that aims an organization which every member contributes to innovation. This paper discusses the case of the pilot project based on this model that aims innovation which was conducted through collaboration with Japanese companies and practical social innovation model which we obtained from this project.

How the knowledge dynamics of individuals, communities, and Ba drive the knowledge management

This paper describes the framework of Knowledge Assessment, a diagnostic methodology to assess various requirements for successful knowledge-based management. It is difficult for a corporation to clarify the important knowledge assets and how to shift them for the future. Although it is the individual knowledge worker who creates knowledge assets, it is also very difficult for the corporation to understand actually how knowledge workers create knowledge. Knowledge Assessment helps to make clear the knowledge strategy in the corporation by visualizing the relationship between the knowledge assets and the method of knowledge work. The results of the Knowledge Assessment in which ten Japanese leading companies participated are also presented. The key findings of the research are knowledge strategy patterns for corporations, and knowledge work patterns for employees. Based on the results, the paper discusses how Knowledge Work/Media Space drives to create knowledge that is important in the future.