scholarly journals Advanced Memory Buoyancy for Forgetful Information Systems

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Jilek ◽  
Jessica Chwalek ◽  
Sven Schwarz ◽  
Markus Schröder ◽  
Heiko Maus ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Organizational Memory ◽  
Information Value ◽  
Value Assessment ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
User Context ◽  
Current Value ◽  
Organizational Memory System

Knowledge workers face an ever increasing flood of informa- tion in their daily lives. To counter this and provide better support for information management and knowledge work in general, we have been investigating solutions inspired by human forgetting since 2013. These solutions are based on Semantic Desktop (SD) and Managed Forgetting(MF) technology. A key concept of the latter is the so-called Memory Buoyancy (MB), which is intended to represent an information item’s current value for the user and allows to employ forgetting mechanisms. The SD thus continuously performs information value assessment up- dating MB and triggering respective MF measures. We extended an SD- based organizational memory system, which we have been using in daily work for over seven years now, with MF mechanisms directly embedding them in daily activities, too, and enabling us to test and optimize them in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first present our initial version of MB and discuss success and failure stories we have been experiencing with it during three years of practical usage. We learned from cognitive psychology that our previous research on context can be beneficial for MF. Thus, we created an advanced MB version especially taking user context, and in particular context switches, into account. These enhancements as well as a first prototypical implementation are presented, too.

scholarly journals Beyond Knowledge Capitalism’s Happy Labour Subject

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852110281
Author(s):  
Breda Gray
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Social Contributions ◽  
A Site ◽  
Study Participants

This article unravels the workings of happiness as integral to knowledge capitalism’s ‘emotionality of rule’ from the perspectives of two cohorts of ‘knowledge workers’: digital creatives and academics. It analyses the ways in which the study participants make work a site of personal fulfilment and happiness as they strive to become ‘happy’ labour subjects. Despite their different worklife trajectories, both cohorts appeal to the promise of happy entrepreneurial productivism. This promise attaches workers to the privileges of knowledge work in ways that downplay its costs. However, the dominance of knowledge capitalism’s happy labour subject is challenged by the backgrounded significance of work’s social benefits in their accounts. As such, this article argues that the individualised depoliticisation of contemporary ‘knowledge work’ can be challenged by re-valorising work’s social contributions.

When Knowledge Work and Analytical Technologies Collide: The Practices and Consequences of Black Boxing Algorithmic Technologies

2021 ◽  
pp. 000183922110167
Author(s):  
Callen Anthony
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Great Promise ◽  
Process Data ◽  
Investment Bank ◽  
Career Trajectories ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Analytical Tools

Analytical technologies that structure and process data hold great promise for organizations but also may pose fundamental challenges for how knowledge workers accomplish tasks. Knowledge workers are generally considered experts who develop deep understanding of their tools, but recent observations suggest that in some situations, they may black box their analytical technologies, meaning they trust their tools without understanding how they work. I conducted a two-year inductive ethnographic study of the use of analytical technologies across four groups in an investment bank and found two distinct paths that these groups used to validate financial analyses through what I call “validating practices”: actions that confirm whether a produced analysis is trustworthy. Surprisingly, engaging in these practices does not necessarily equate to understanding the calculations performed by the technologies. In one path, validating practices are partitioned across junior and senior roles: junior bankers engage in assembling tasks and use the analytical tools to perform analysis, while only senior bankers interpret the analysis. In the other path, junior and senior members engage in co-construction: junior bankers do both assembling and interpreting tasks, and senior bankers engage in interpreting and provide feedback on junior bankers’ reasoning and choices. Both junior and senior bankers in the partitioning groups routinely black boxed the algorithms embedded in their technologies, taking them for granted without understanding them. By contrast, bankers in the co-construction groups were conscious of the algorithms and understood their potential impact. I found that black boxing influenced the knowledge outputs of these bankers and constrained the development of junior members’ expertise, with consequences for their career trajectories.

Optimizing Knowledge-Work Through Personal Knowledge Management

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Rezvan Hosseingholizadeh ◽  
Hadi El-Farr ◽  
Somayyeh Ebrahimi Koushk Mahdi
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Personal Knowledge ◽  
Work Activities ◽  
Personal Knowledge Management ◽  
Individual Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Intensive ◽  
Discretionary Behavior

Knowledge-work is a discretionary behavior, and knowledge-workers should be viewed as investors of their intellectual capital. That said, effective knowledge-work is mostly dependent on the performance of individual knowledge-workers who drive the success of knowledge-intensive organizations. Therefore, the study takes the perspective of personal knowledge management in enforcing the effectiveness of knowledge-work activities. This study empirically demonstrates that knowledge-workers' behaviors are dependent on their motivation, ability and opportunity to perform knowledge-work activities. This study provides insights and future directions for research on knowledge-work as a discretionary behavior in organization and the factors influencing it. Scholars can investigate the effect of empowerment of individuals on their tendency to knowledge-creation, knowledge-sharing and knowledge-application. Since personal-knowledge often raise the issue of knowledge ownership, further attention to ethical issues may bring valuable insights for KM in organizations.

Biological and Information Systems Approaches

2011 ◽  
pp. 336-344
Author(s):  
Barry E. Atkinson ◽  
Frada Burstein
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Memory System ◽  
Organizational Memory ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Systems Approaches ◽  
Organizational Memory System

Knowledge of past activities, discoveries, and events is applied by businesses to support everyday operations in much the same manner that human beings use their personal memories. But the true nature of organizational memory (OM) remains obscure, and information-systems practitioners have no clear definitional model of what they are working toward and have been unable to build a convincing organizational memory system (Olfman, 1998).

A Mobile Portal for Academe

2011 ◽  
pp. 577-582
Author(s):  
Hans Lehmann ◽  
Stefan Berger ◽  
Ulrich Remus
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Financial Services ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Working Environments ◽  
Knowledge Intensive

Today, many working environments and industries are considered as knowledge-intensive, that is, consulting, software, pharmaceutics, financial services, and so forth, and the share of knowledge work has risen continuously during the last decades (Wolff, 2005). Knowledge management (KM) has been introduced to overcome some of the problems knowledge workers are faced when handling knowledge, that is, the problems of storing, organizing, and distributing large amounts of knowledge and its corresponding problem of information overload and so forth (Maier, 2004).

Designing Organizational Memory for Knowledge Management Support in Collaborative Learning

2011 ◽  
pp. 233-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kam Hou Vat
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Organizational Memory ◽  
Management Support ◽  
University Environment ◽  
Knowledge Domains ◽  
Knowledge Processes ◽  
Meta Modeling ◽  
Training And Research

This chapter investigates the design of organizational memory (OM) which is targeted for knowledge management (KM) support tailored for collaboration among academic staff and students in a university environment. Specifically, we describe our KM initiatives to support organizational learning in terms of the knowledge processes evolving over selected knowledge domains for training and research purpose. The chapter also depicts our ideas on knowledge items regarding their meta-modeling, indexing, and ontological aspects. The overall design of our OM is then discussed in terms of its context for knowledge work. The paper concludes by re-iterating the challenges in knowledge sharing and depositing into the OM for its continuous growth and utilization.

Rewarding Knowledge Workers

2011 ◽  
pp. 309-320
Author(s):  
Sofiane Sahraoui
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Human Resource Management ◽  
Human Resource ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
Intellectual Assets ◽  
Primary Focus

In a business environment characterized by digitization, globalization, mobility, workgroups, immediacy, and disintermediation (Tapscott, 1996), organizations have become ever more reliant on delivering maximum value to their customers to keep competitive. Knowledge workers using computing and communication technologies produce intangible goods and services. They represent the primary leverage through which organizations maximize the value offered to their customers. Leveraging the intellectual assets of knowledge workers should be the primary focus of planning processes where customer service systems are designed along with accompanying IT solutions. Knowledge work will require new forms of management and, implicitly, a new strategy for human resource management (Collins, 1998). Consequently, human resource management is increasingly trying to reinvent itself around the emerging concepts of knowledge work and core competencies (Lawler, 2000).

scholarly journals On Challenges and Opportunities of Designing Integrated IT Platforms for Supporting Knowledge Works in Organizations

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-46
Author(s):  
Arijit Laha
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Support Systems ◽  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Organizational Knowledge ◽  
Task Type ◽  
Work Support ◽  
Information Usage ◽  
Task Oriented

In an ideal Knowledge Management environment in an organization, two objectives need to be achieved. Firstly, knowledge workers should have customized informational support for their respective works and secondly, workers across the organization should be able to easily understand and utilize information produced from myriads of knowledge works. Unfortunately, in current KM research and practices, these two goals are rarely addressed together. In fact, most of the KM practices subscribe either to the task-based KM approaches or to the generic/universalistic KM approaches. Typically, each of them is either unable to cater to the need of the other category or provide some ad hoc measures. This paper examines the major issues from a very basic level to understand the problems and attempts to present a solution that systematically covers both the objectives of KM. In the process, it develops a theory, the Task-oriented Organizational Knowledge Management (TOKM), within which the problems are analysed and a viable solution is identified. TOKM gives us a set of design principles for building a new class of IT-based support systems which can serve as a major component of organizational KM. TOKM focuses on information usage in knowledge works and the scope of technology intervention in the related processes. In this paper, the Task-oriented Organizational Knowledge Management is presented as an Information System Design Theory (ISDT) for building integrated IT platforms for supporting organizational KM. In developing the design, the information requirements of knowledge workers in light of an information usage model of knowledge works is studied. Then the model is extended to study possibilities of more advanced IT support and formulate them in the form of a set of meta-requirements. Following the IS design theory paradigm, a set of artifacts are hypothesized to meet the requirements. Finally, a design method, as a possible approach of building an IT-based integrated platform, the Knowledge-work Support Platform (KwSP), is outlined to realize the artifacts in order to meet the requirements. KwSP is a powerful platform for building and maintaining a number of task-type specific Knowledge-work Support Systems (KwSS) on a common sharable platform. Each KwSS, for the task-type supported by it, can be easily designed to provide extensive and sophisticated support to individual as well as group of knowledge workers in performing their respective knowledge work instances.

Slowing work down by teleworking periodically in rural settings?

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Vesala ◽  
Seppo Tuomivaara
Keyword(s):  
Work Environment ◽  
Repeated Measures ◽  
Time Pressure ◽  
Knowledge Workers ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Occupational Position ◽  
Work Related ◽  
As Stress

Purpose – The rise of knowledge work has entailed controversial characteristics for well-being at work. Increased intensification, discontinuities and interruptions at work have been reported. However, knowledge workers have the opportunity to flexibly adjust their work arrangements to support their concentration, inspiration or recuperation. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the experienced well-being of 46 knowledge workers was subject to changes during and after a retreat type telework period in rural archipelago environment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a longitudinal survey among the participants at three points in time: one to three weeks before, during, and two to eight weeks after the period. The authors analyzed the experienced changes in psychosocial work environment and well-being at work by the measurement period by means of repeated measures variance analysis. In the next step the authors included the group variable of occupational position to the model. Findings – The analysis showed a decrease in the following measures: experienced time pressure, interruptions, negative feelings at work, exhaustiveness of work as well as stress and an increase in work satisfaction. There were no changes in experienced job influence, clarity of work goals and work engagement. Occupational position had some effect to the changes. Private entrepreneurs and supervisors experienced more remarkable effects of improvement in work-related well-being than subordinates. However, the effects were less sustainable for the supervisors than the other two groups. Originality/value – This paper provides insights into how work and well-being are affected by the immediate work environment and how well-being at work can be supported by retreat type telework arrangements.

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