Tim Reichling

Expert Recommender: Designing for a Network Organization

Recent knowledge management initiatives focus on expertise sharing within formal organizational units and informal communities of practice. Expert recommender systems seem to be a promising tool in support of these initiatives. This paper presents experiences in designing an expert recommender system for a knowledge-intensive organization, namely the National Industry Association (NIA). Field study results provide a set of specific design requirements. Based on these requirements, we have designed an expert recommender system which is integrated into the specific software infrastructure of the organizational setting. The organizational setting is, as we will show, specific for historical, political, and economic reasons. These particularities influence the employees’ organizational and (inter-)personal needs within this setting. The paper connects empirical findings of a long-term case study with design experiences of an expertise recommender system.

Expert recommender systems in practice: evaluating semi-automatic profile generation

Expert recommender systems (ERS) are considered a promising technology in knowledge management. However, there are very few studies which evaluated their appropriation in practice. In this paper, we present results of a case study of expert recommender technology in a large European industrial association. Unlike existing expert recommender approaches, the system involves users in selecting textual documents for semi-automatic profile generation. Our study focuses on the appropriation of this functionality and discusses impacts from an organizational perspective.

Matching human actors based on their texts: design and evaluation of an instance of the ExpertFinding framework

Bringing together human actors with similar interests, skills or expertise is a major challenge in community-based knowledge management. We believe that writing or reading textual documents can be an indicator for a human actors interests, skills or expertise. In this paper, we describe an approach of matching human actors based on the similarity of text collections that can be attributed to them. By integrating standard methods of text analysis, we extract and match user profiles based on a large collection of documents. We present an instance of the ExpertFinder Framework which measures the similarity of these profiles by means of the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) algorithm. The quality of the algorithmic approach was evaluated by comparing its results with judgments of different human actors.

Expertise sharing in a heterogeneous organizational environment

The term knowledge management (KM) has lost most of its magic during the past few years: While knowledge has been identified as an important resource and key factor for productivity gains and innovation in organizations, there seems to be no generally applicable (and easy) way to utilize this resource. In this paper we present results of a field study that was conducted within a major European industrial association. The study focused on knowledge intense processes among the association and its member companies which were supposed to be improved by KM strategies and systems. The organizational setting appears to be unique in different ways: A grown and highly decentralized organizational structure, goods that exclusively consist of human and social capital and a distinct mutual unawareness of competencies and responsibilities within the organization define our field of application.

Impacts of new technologies on media usage and social behaviour in domestic environments

Technological infrastructure at home is changing continuously and is becoming increasingly interconnected. Media devices, including the TV set, provide access to the Internet and offer manifold opportunities to consume media on demand. Additionally, personal devices, such as smartphones, also enable flexible consumption and sharing of media. Questions about how these technologies change the users media usage and how these changes affect the social structure of a household, however, remain largely unanswered. In order to gain insight into the adoption of new technologies into daily routines, we explored these changes in respect of peoples media usage in a qualitative long-term Living Lab study. We will present findings regarding personal routines, flexible integration of new devices into existing practices, influences on households as social systems and related issues in device access and collective use. We will highlight potentials and conflicts regarding device shifts and roles; restrictions in device access; social influences in the living room; and individual changes in media consumption.

Supporting collaborative learning by matching human actors

Learning platforms focus often on content presentation. Collaborative aspects are mostly dealt with by providing functionality to annotate parts of the content or discuss with other learners about the content. Nowadays learning platforms do not support systematically match making processes among those actors who are able to support their individual learning process mutually. We assume that next generation learning platforms will include functionality to make colearners aware of each other, match learners with complementary competencies, and allow for the generation of expertise maps. Design principles, a general architecture, and a system providing these functionalities are presented. Future challenges in the field of expertise matching are discussed.

New technology@home: impacts on usage behavior and social structures

Studying domestic usage contexts has become an important field in research. Recent technological improvements have made media available on different devices, in different contexts and from different places. The adoption and appropriation of new devices and technologies has led to a more flexible usage behavior. However, even if we know about such a behavior, many questions, regarding how new technology changes the users media usage and how these changes affect the social structure in a household, are still unanswered. We will address this topic in our work and want to provide an insight on how recent media consumption patterns have changed due to the appropriation of new technologies in the home. Based on a qualitative long-term Living Lab study we will present various patterns based on changes in media usage routines and their influences on households as social systems. The results provide a detailed understanding of how the new technology is embedded within domestic life by considering potentials and conflicts that also address further design oriented work.

Business Finder – A Tool for Regional Networking among Organizations

End User Development (EUD) aims at the enabling of end users to adapt, modify or extend software and has become an important keyword for software designers. Discussing premises for the success of EUD, several authors have stated that processes of knowledge development and diffusion play an important role. Current research discusses such Knowledge-Management issues mostly in the client organization. But if we want to bring an End User perspective into design practice, we have to take into account how producers manage their costumerrelated knowledge and bring it into action. Therefore, the study presented here describes the results of a related Business Ethnography, which was carried out in a small enterprise of the German software branch. The paper explains how this ethnographic action research helped to identify practices, potentials and problems in the enterprise to acquire, secure and use knowledge about the end users of its products. Preliminary findings demonstrate that EUD is not only a technical, but also a Knowledge-Management challenge for software enterprises.Networks of organizations improve the competitiveness of its member companies. Computer applications can make the competencies of organizations more visible to encourage companies to find matching costumers, suppliers, or cooperation partners. Business Finder (BF) is a tool for improving mutual aware- ness among small and medium enterprises (SME) in regional networks. BF is based on text matching algorithms already applied among human actors within the field of knowledge management. Being integrated into the ordinary document management, BF allows creating updated, comprehensive, and detailed profiles of an organizations competencies and activities. Searching on profiles of other or- ganizations enables identifying potential partners. The design of BF is based on an empirical study into networking needs among SME in the IT domain. The pre- study together with an early evaluation study was conducted in the German region of Siegen-Wittgenstein.

Toward Regional Clusters: Networking Events, Collaborative Research, and the Business Finder

Networks of regionally collocated organizations improve the competitiveness of their member companies. This is not only a result of lower transportation costs when delivering or purchasing physical goods but also other matters such as mutual trust or a higher diffusion of specialized knowledge among companies that have emerged as important aspects of regional networks. Even increased competition among collocated companies can lead to comparative advantages over externals as a result of an increased pressure for innovation. While the reasons why regional networks of companies offer comparative advantages has been widely investigated, the question arises as to how networks can be developed in terms of higher interconnectedness and deeper connections.

Probleme im Umgang mit gemeinsamen Arbeitsunterlagen und Dokumenten

Mit der Einfuhrung von Groupware im technischen Bereich soll den Kooperati-onsproblemen entgegengewirkt werden, die haufig in der Konstruktion auftreten. Im ORGTECH-Projekt wurden dazu Arbeits aufgaben und -bereiche untersucht und ein CSCW-System installiert. Es zeigte sich, dass die Anwender spezielle Anforderungen an das Telekooperationssystem stellen, die insbesondere die Realisierung des externen Datenzugriffs auf technische Dokumente beinhalten. Die im Anwendungsfeld archivierten Daten liegen aber in unterschiedlichen Medien und in verschiedenen Formaten an verteilten Orten in kaum handhabbarer Weise vor. Die unzureichende Verfugbarkeit relevanter Dokumente beeintrachtigt die Akzeptanz des CSCW-Systems. In diesem Beitrag werden die problematischen Bereiche der Verwaltung technischer Dokumente dargestellt und Losungsansatze aufgezeigt. Diese Ansatze wurden mit den Anwendern diskutiert und fuhrten zu prototypischen Entwicklungen. Hierzu wird der Diskussionsprozess mit den Anwen¬dern wiedergegeben. In diesem Beitrag wird neben den Problemen im Umgang mit gemeinsamen Arbeitsunterlagen die besondere Bedeutung der Verfugbarkeit der Arbeitsdokumente als Basis fur Telekooperation herausgestellt.