Towards Need-driven Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Teams

Hans-Jörg Happel, FZI Karlsruhe, 02.09.2009

8th Int. Conference on Knowledge Management. (I-Know 2009)Graz, Austria; 2.-4. September 2009

Agenda

• Distributed teams• Knowledge sharing approaches• „Need-driven“ knowledge sharing• Prototypes• Conclusion

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Task complexity – car example

• Modern cars consist of ~20k single parts• Suppliers cover up to 80% of design and production [MF04]

Distributed Work requires, but also impedes knowledge sharing

DevelopingComplex Products and Services

Increasing Modularization & Specialization

Increasing Distribution of Teams

Increasing Distribution of Teams

Increasing Agility/Ad Hoc Teams

impedesimpedes

Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge SharingCoordination

requires

Knowledge sharing problems

• Non-participation of providers– Time & Effort– Lack of motivation– Privacy

• Amplified in distributed settings (>30 meters)– Lack of context– Lack of trust– Reduced communication channels

• Important role of mediation technologies (i.e. communication media)

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“Developers are usually interested in resolving their problems rather than documenting their

own ones, offering new knowledge or extending the knowledge-base.” [Industrial Partner]

“Developers are usually interested in resolving their problems rather than documenting their

own ones, offering new knowledge or extending the knowledge-base.” [Industrial Partner]

Knowledge Sharing as a communication process

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ExplicitExplicit

ImplicitImplicit

Semi-ExplicitSemi-Explicit

Information seeker

Information provider

Query

Answer

Information need• explicit (e.g. query)• implicit („push triggered“)

Mediation ServicesMediation Services

Privateinformation space

Privateinformation space

Privateinformation space

Privateinformation space

Sharedinformation space

Sharedinformation space

Mediation spaceMediation space

Knowledge sharing• need-driven („pull“, request)• pro-active („push“)

Knowledge sharing

• „Advanced mediation properties“– Pre-Transfer (Demanding, Matching, Offering)– Transfer (Consumption, Negotiation, Provision)

• Typical approaches– Personalization (Face-to-Face, IM/Chat)– Codification (Forums, Document sharing)

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Properties of differentknowledge sharing approaches

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Observations• Personalization strategies do not „scale up“ for large organizations ( better for

specific needs)• Codification strategies decouple seekers and providers and are less „need-driven“

( better for general needs) Communication gap between information seekers and information providers

– No way for information seekers to communicate demands– No way for information providers to find out which information is really sought– Usually bad support for matching & negotiation

• Questions– Is it possible to solve the trade-off between scalable and need-driven knowledge

sharing?– Can the communication gap be bridged by better mediation services to achieve „need-

driven“ knowledge sharing (NKS)?

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Mediation services and spaces for need-driven knowledge sharing

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NKS Prototypes

• Inverse Search– Identify private files worth sharing to better

diffuse them into Shared Information Spaces

• Woogle– Marrying Wikis with Enterprise Search

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Inverse Search• Problem in conventional search &

recommendation systems– Information seekers (1) match queries

against a given corpus and (2) “import” public documents into their local space

– Information providers are not part of this standard model although they are potential providers of additional information

• Approach– Inverse search: Information

providers (3) matching their corpus against a given set of queries (4) to identify documents worth sharing

QueriesPublic

IndexPublic(1) Query

(2) Results

Information seeker Information provider

(3) iSearch

(4) Share

[Ha08]

„Need to share“

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Woogle

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Anatomy of Woogle4MediaWikihttp://myHost/wiki/Woogle:SOAP

External data sources can be accessed

Collaborative description of the information need

Notifications concerningsearch activities

Discussion page

Directly create new knowledge from the search dialog

Search has a URI and can be linked from within the Wiki(one page per search term)

Chose from different sources and/or content types

Additional clues with meta-information about a need

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Woogle4MediaWiki: Demand guidance

• „Red links“ signal „desired pages“ in the Wiki

• However, users are not informed how strong the information need is, and in which context it is required

• Woogle uses queries and further metadata to qualify desired content

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graz

Initial empirical results

• Provider‘s perspective– KOMA Online-Survey of Software Developers (n=1477)

• >90% would share context of a problem (libraries used, version, tools) and actions performed to solve the problem• 88% share knowledge personally (F2F, E-Mail) but only 33% with more than one person (Wiki/Groupware systems)• 54% indicated to have no time for sharing; 30% can not identify information worth sharing

– Analyzing software developers descriptions of work sessions from multiple systems (n~750.000) 10% were „pseudo descriptions“ [MH2009]

• Seeker‘s perspective– Analysis of intranet query logs of a german IT company: 500 of 2000 queries

yielding zero results (one month of log data)– Inverse search: out of 50 ranked terms, 40 were ranked „actively interested“

(activvely sought within last 6 years or planning to seek) by at least one person (10 of them by at last 4 people)

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Summary• Distributed work requires but also impedes

knowledge sharing– Especially, codified, asynchronous knowledge sharing is

more producer-oriented and less „need driven“ due to limitations of current media & tools

• Hypothesis: novel mediation services and mediation spaces can help to improve knowledge sharing in such settings

– Supported by intial evaluation studies– Real world evaluation is ongoing (online field study)– Interested MediaWiki users sought!

• Further Information, Screencasts, Live Demos and Downloads at http://www.teamweaver.org

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Literature• [Ha09] Hans-Jörg Happel: Social Search and Need-driven Knowledge

Sharing in Wikis with Woogle. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym'09) (to appear)

• [Ha08] Hans-Jörg Happel: Closing Information Gaps with Inverse Search. In Proceeedings of the 7th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM2008).

• [MF04] Mercer Management Consulting; Fraunhofer-Institut für Produktionstechnik und Automatisierung -IPA-, Stuttgart; Fraunhofer-Institut für Materialfluss und Logistik -IML-, Dortmund: Future Automotive Industry Structure (FAST) 2015 - die neue Arbeitsteilung in der Automobilindustrie. Frankfurt/M.: VDA, 2004.

• [MH09] Walid Maalej, Hans-Jörg Happel: From Work to Word: How Do Software Developers Describe Their Work? In: Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2009)