skip to main content
10.1145/1234772.1234784acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschimitConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Supporting expertise awareness: finding out what others know

Published: 30 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative approach to solve the problem of missing transparency of competencies within virtual organizations. We based our work on empirical studies to cope with the problem of competence finding in distributed organizations. Former studies have shown that central storage of expertise profiles is inappropriate due to missing flexibility and high costs of maintenance. The focus of our approach is to support peripheral awareness to become aware of the available competences in organizations. Our approach runs along two lines: making expertise-related communication visible for all members of an organization and visualizing competence-indicating events in collaboration infrastructures. We verified this approach by the evaluation of a prototypical implementation.

References

[1]
M. S. Ackerman and T. W. Malone. Answer Garden: A tool for growing Organizational Memory. In Procceedings of the ACM Conference on Office Information Systems, pages 31--39. ACM Press, 1990.
[2]
M. S. Ackerman and D. W. McDonald. Answer Garden 2: Merging Organizational Memory with Collaborative Help. In Procceedings of the International Conference on CSCW'96, pages 97--105. ACM Press, 1996.
[3]
R. Akscyn, D. McCracken, and E. A. Yoder. KMS: A distributed Hypermedia system for managing Knowledge in Organizations. Communications of the ACM, 31(7):820--835, 1988.
[4]
L. Bannon and K. Kuutti. Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory: From Storage to Active Remembering. In Proceedings of HICSS-29, 1996.
[5]
S. Benford and L. Fahlen. A Spatial Model of Interaction in Large Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of the 3rd European Conf. on CSCW (ECSCW'93), page 109124. Kluwer, 1993.
[6]
T. H. Davenport and L. Prusak. Working knowledge: how organizations manage what they know. Harvard Business School, 1998.
[7]
P. Dourish and V. Bellotti. Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces. In Proc. of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'92), pages 107--114. ACM Press, 1992.
[8]
K. Groth and J. Bowers. On Finding things out: Situated organizational knowledge in CSCW. In Proceedings. of the 7th ECSCW, pages 279--298. Kluwer, 2001.
[9]
J. Hahn and M. R. Subramani. A framework of knowledge management systems: issues and challenges for theory and practice. In Proceedings of the Twenty First international Conference on information Systems (ICIS'00), pages 302--312. Association for Information Systems, 2000.
[10]
C. Heath and P. Luff. Collaboration and Control: Crisis Management and Multimedia Technology in London Underground Control Rooms. Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 1(1--2):69--94, 1992.
[11]
S. R. Hiltz and M. Turoff. Structuring computer-mediated communication systems to avoid information overload. Communications of the ACM, 28(7):680--689, 1985.
[12]
R. Johansen. Groupware: Computer Support for Business Teams. Freepress, New York, 1988.
[13]
P. Mambrey, V. Pipek, and M. Rohde. Wissen und Lernen in virtuellen Organisationen. Physica, Heidelberg, 2003.
[14]
G. Mark, L. Fuchs, and M. Sohlenkamp. Supporting Groupware Conventions through Contextual Awareness. In Proceedings of the European Conference on CS2CW (ECSCW'97). Kluwer, 1997.
[15]
D. W. McDonald and M. S. Ackerman. Expertise Recommender: A Flexible Recommendation Architecture. In Preceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'00), pages 231--240. ACM Press, 2000.
[16]
A. Mowshowitz. Virtual Organization. Communications of the ACM, 40(9):30--37, 1997.
[17]
J. Nielsen. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, London, 1993.
[18]
I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi. The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford University Press, New York, 1995.
[19]
A. Picot, R. Reichwald, and R. Wigant. Die grenzenlose Unternehmung Information, Organisation und Management. Gabler, Wiesbaden, 3 edition, 1998.
[20]
V. Pipek, J. Hinrichs, and V. Wulf. Sharing expertise: Challenges for technical support. In M. Ackerman, V. Pipek, and V. Wulf, editors, Beyond Knowledge Management: Sharing Expertise. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003.
[21]
V. Pipek and M. Won. Communication-oriented Computer Support for Knowledge Management. Informatik Informatique, 2002(1):39--43, 2002.
[22]
V. Pipek and V. Wulf. Pruning the Answer Garden: Knowledge Sharing in Maintenance Engineering. In Proceedings of the European Conference on CSCW, pages 1--20. Kluwer, 2003.
[23]
U. Rauschenbach. Supporting Awareness in Shared Workspaces Using Relevance-dependent Event Notifications. In Proceedings of CVE'96 Workshop Collaborative Virtual Environments, Nottingham, 1996.
[24]
T. Reichling and M. Veith. Expertise sharing in a heterogeneous organizational environment. In Proceedings of the Europ. Conference on CSCW (ECSCW'05). Springer, 2005.
[25]
M. Rittenbruch, H. Kahler, and A. B. Cremers. Supporting cooperation in a virtual organization. In Proceedings of the international conference on Information systems, pages 30--38. Association for Information Systems, 1998.
[26]
T. Rodden. Populating the Application: A Model of Awareness for Cooperative Applications. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'96), pages 87--96. ACM Press, 1996.
[27]
O. Sandor, C. Bogdan, and J. Bowers. Aether: An Awareness Engine For CSCW. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conf. on CSCW (ECSCW'97), pages 221--236. Kluwer, 1997.
[28]
U. Schultze and B. Vandenbosch. Information Overload in a Groupware Environment: Now you see it, now you don't. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 8(2):127--148, 1998.
[29]
S. B. Shum. Negotiating the Construction and Reconstruction of Organisational Memories. Journal of Universal Computer Science (Special Issue on IT for Knowledge Management), 3(8):899--928, 1997.
[30]
B. Törpel, V. Pipek, and M. Rittenbruch. Creating heterogeneity-evolving use of groupware in a network of freelancers. Special Issue of the Int. Journal on CSCW on" Evolving Use of Groupware", 12:381--409, 2003.
[31]
G. von Krogh and M. Venzin. Anhaltende Wettbewerbsvorteile durch Wissensmanagement. Die Unternehmung, 49(6):417--436, 1995.
[32]
J. P. Walsh and G. R. Unger. Organizational Memory. Academy of Management Review, 16(1):57--91, 1991.
[33]
D. Yimam and A. Kobsa. Expert finding systems for organizations: Problem and domain analysis and the demoir. In M. S. Ackerman, V. Pipek, and V. Wulf, editors, Beyond Knowledge Management: Sharing Expertise, pages 327--358. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Beyond Hallway Chats ? Negotiating Content Awareness in Hybrid Work PracticesProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3677523(508-513)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
  • (2022)Group awareness and regulation in computer-supported collaborative learningInternational Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning10.1007/s11412-022-09361-117:1(11-38)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2022
  • (2018)Risk Information Recommendation for Engineering WorkersArtificial Intelligence XXXV10.1007/978-3-030-04191-5_27(311-325)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Supporting expertise awareness: finding out what others know

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHIMIT '07: Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Computer human interaction for the management of information technology
    March 2007
    124 pages
    ISBN:9781595936356
    DOI:10.1145/1234772
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 30 March 2007

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. awareness
    2. expertise
    3. human-computer interaction
    4. knowledge management

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    CHiMiT07
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CHIMIT '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 34 submissions, 32%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 15 of 43 submissions, 35%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)7
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
    Reflects downloads up to 19 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Beyond Hallway Chats ? Negotiating Content Awareness in Hybrid Work PracticesProceedings of Mensch und Computer 202410.1145/3670653.3677523(508-513)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2024
    • (2022)Group awareness and regulation in computer-supported collaborative learningInternational Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning10.1007/s11412-022-09361-117:1(11-38)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2022
    • (2018)Risk Information Recommendation for Engineering WorkersArtificial Intelligence XXXV10.1007/978-3-030-04191-5_27(311-325)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2018
    • (2013)Sharing Knowledge and ExpertiseComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-013-9192-822:4-6(531-573)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2013
    • (2013)Beyond practices: A field study of the contextual factors impacting collaborative information seekingProceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/meet.1450490113149:1(1-10)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2013
    • (2012)Evolving Social Media into Productivity PlatformsProceedings of the 2012 Annual SRII Global Conference10.1109/SRII.2012.29(183-190)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2012
    • (2012)When Social Media Meet the EnterpriseProceedings of the 2012 IEEE 16th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference10.1109/EDOC.2012.31(201-210)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2012
    • (2012)Beyond Expertise SeekingComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-011-9135-121:2-3(283-315)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2012
    • (2009)WaterCoolerProceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/1531674.1531706(219-228)Online publication date: 13-May-2009

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media