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OPUS - IT-supported Visualization and Evaluation of Virtual Knowledge Communities. Applying Social Network Intelligence Software in Knowledge Management to enable knowledge oriented People Network Management
TU Berlin, Fakultaet IV - Elektrotechnik und Informatik, (апреля 2005)
Аннотация
After analyzing current economic indicators to prove the necessity of Knowledge Management for maintaining competitiveness, the basic foundations of the discipline are analyzed. This includes a detailed discussion of the core term �knowledge� itself as well as a comprehensive overview of the development of KM approaches. This results in a timeline which shows the development of the research discipline of KM during the past decades. Afterwards, the underlying complex theories of systems sciences and sociology are developed towards an overview about properties and requirements of modern and complex network organizations. As a result, in part 3.6., novel and concrete implications for a modern and network oriented approach to KM are derived from this discussion. Subsequently, Communities of Practice are identified and described as a major recent concept, which is an actual instantiation of a networked organization for organizing Knowledge Work in expert groups. Their main properties, roles, and processes of a community and its development through lifecycle stages are described. The resulting picture of the basic mechanisms is then extended with an extensive discussion of Information Technology to support the expert networks. However, the analysis results in the insight, that current IT is not at all satisfying the requirements of virtual Knowledge Communities in corporate applications. Especially, the important role of the community moderator and manager is unsatisfactorily supported. This person needs transparency about the large group he is responsible for. This implies the necessity of instruments for monitoring, measurement and evaluation, which is also emphasized by thought leaders and major institutions in the CoP area. Further, the sociability of the expert group needs to be improved. To address these issues, a comprehensive measurement system for analyzing virtual Knowledge Communities is developed. It draws its measures primarily from sociological domains, such as Social Capital and Trust research and Social Network Analysis; but it also includes Knowledge Processes and plain structural analysis. To implement the conceptualized support for CoPs with appropriate measures and visualizations, an extensive software solution which aids as an add-on to current community platforms has been developed and is introduced. The primary challenge was to create insightful visualizations, which integrate 2D and 3D Graph Drawing Techniques for Social Network Analysis with Topic and Keyword Analysis methods and to merge this conglomerate with the measurement system. Finally, three case studies are introduced to illustrate the application of the software solution and its benefits for providing a CoP moderator or manager with detailed insights about the structure and processes of his group.
