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Towards virtualizing the helpdesk: assessing the relevance of knowledge across distance

Published: 14 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Managers of information systems face a knowledge crisis as they operate in increasingly heterogeneous, hostile, expertise-poor environments. This problem is compounded for small organizations. This paper presents results from field research on the feasibility of fostering cross-organizational knowledge sharing in order to expand access to expertise for pernicious problems while minimizing the loss of context, such as situational and environmental factors, that impacts the usefulness of solutions. This essentially creates a virtual, cross-organizational helpdesk.
In order to understand the utility of such a system we explore how employees' satisfaction with helpdesk articles changes as the source of the articles moves further away from local creation to generic solutions. Our findings suggest that procedurally-based information available within major Internet repositories tends to be the most highly relevant and valued within organizations. However, when no documentation is available from manufacturers, information contributed by partner sites is more effective than those solely developed in-house. This paper suggests strategies for reusing information to impact work within small organizations.

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  • (2012)GROUP workshop proposalProceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/2389176.2389238(321-322)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2012
  • (2011)Designing the future of collaborative workplace systemsProceedings of the 2011 iConference10.1145/1940761.1940785(174-180)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2011
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHiMiT '08: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
November 2008
82 pages
ISBN:9781605583556
DOI:10.1145/1477973
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]

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Publication History

Published: 14 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. cross-organizational
  2. information reuse
  3. knowledge management
  4. organizational memory
  5. relevance
  6. virtual helpdesk

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)A Case Study of Phishing Incident Response in an Educational OrganizationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34760795:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
  • (2012)GROUP workshop proposalProceedings of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/2389176.2389238(321-322)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2012
  • (2011)Designing the future of collaborative workplace systemsProceedings of the 2011 iConference10.1145/1940761.1940785(174-180)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2011
  • (2011)Realizing the Promise of Web 2.0: Engaging Community IntelligenceJournal of Health Communication10.1080/10810730.2011.58988216:sup1(10-31)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2011
  • (2010)Alternate reality games and groupworkProceedings of the 2010 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/1880071.1880121(303-304)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2010
  • (2009)Wiki anxietyProceedings of the Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology10.1145/1641587.1641597(64-67)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2009
  • (2009)Cross-organizational information reuseProceedings of the 2009 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/1531674.1531740(393-394)Online publication date: 13-May-2009

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