In technical cooperation with the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society

ABSTRACT

The last couple years have seen the emergence of a range of extremely light-weight, robust, and virtually free technologies that suggest that the knowledge management logjam may finally be breaking up. We have long experienced the challenges of using technology to support the effective retention of and access to information and knowledge in organizations. It is a concern even in industries such as aerospace that practice considerable formal archiving. Decades of research into knowledge engineering and other approaches, and experiences with Lotus Notes and other products, have not solved the problems. Much information is not recorded or maintained, and people can't or don't create useful metadata or more extensive contextual information that would enable it to be accessed and interpreted. Features of web-based phenomena primarily used by young people today, such as blogging and tagging, are likely to move into organizations with as much impact as email and word processing twenty years ago, and spread much more rapidly. This presentation describes and illustrates these technologies in some detail, and suggests how enterprise use may evolve, in some cases based on successful small-scale trials.

BIOGRAPHY

Jonathan Grudin is a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research. He was previously Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, in the Computers, Organizations, Policy and Society research group. He worked as a software developer at Wang Laboratories before and after getting a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology with Don Norman at UCSD. He has also worked at the consortium MCC in Austin and the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, and taught at Aarhus, Keio and Oslo Universities. His research has focused on the adoption and use of technologies to support communication, information sharing, and coordination. He was Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction and is now ACM Computing Surveys Associate Editor for Human-Computer Interaction. He has also served on the editorial boards of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Information Systems Research, and other journals. With his long-time collaborator Steven Poltrock of Boeing, he co-chaired the CSCW 98 Conference.