Abstract
The Answer Garden supports knowledge sharing in two intertwined ways: by making relevant information retrievable and by mediating access to people with knowledge. We present a case study in which the Answer Garden approach was applied to encourage knowledge sharing in maintenance engineering of a steel mill. The results show that the sheer amount of drawings and the long history of changing classification schemes challenge the Answer Garden approach as well as domain-specific needs for technically mediated communication. Moreover, the given division of labor and organizational micro-politics prevent the Answer Garden approach from encouraging knowledge sharing. Based on these experiences, design directions for knowledge management systems are pointed out. Finally, the results of the study are related to a recent controversy on technology support for expertise location.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ackerman, M.S.; Malone, T.W. (1990): Answer Garden: A tool for growing Organizational Memoiy; in: Proc. of the ACM Conference on Office Information Systems, pp. 31–39
Ackerman, M.S. (1994): Augmenting the organizational memory: a field study of Answer Garden, in: Proc. of the CSCW’94 Conference, ACM Press, pp. 243–252
Ackerman, M. S. (1996): Definitional and Contextual Issues in Organizational and Group Memories, in: Technology and People, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 10–24
Ackerman, M.S.; McDonald, D.W. (1996): Answer Garden 2: Merging Organizational Memory with Collaborative Help, in: Int. Conf. on CSCW’96, ACM Press, pp. 97–105
Ackerman, M.S. (1998): Augmenting Organizational Memory: A Field Study of Answer Garden, in: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 16(3). pp. 203–224
Ackerman, M. S.; Halverson, C. (1998). Considering an Organization’s Memory. Int. Conf. on CSCW’98, Seattle, WA, ACM Press, New York, pp. 39–48
Ackerman, M. S.; Pipek, V.; Wulf, V. (eds) (2003): Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management, MIT Press, Cambridge MA
Bannon, L.; Kuutti, K. (1996): Shifting Perspectives on Organizational Memory: From Storage to Active Remembering, in: Proceedings of HICSS-29, pp. 156–167
Buckingham Shum, S. (1997): Negotiating the Construction and Reconstruction of Organisational Memories’, in: Journal of Universal Computer Science (Special Issue on IT for Knowledge Management), 3(8), 899–928, http://www.jucs.org/
Davenport, T.H. and Prusak, L. (1998): Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA.
Ehrlich, K. (2003): Locating Expertise: Design Issues for an Expertise Locator System, in: Ackerman, M.; Pipek, V.; Wulf, V. (eds): Expertise Sharing: Beyond Knowledge Management, MIT-Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 137–158
Fagrell, H., Ljungberg, F. and Kristofferson, S. (1999): Exploring support for knowledge management in mobile work, in: Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on CSCW (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1999), Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 259–276
Flores, F., Graves, M., Hartfield, B., Winograd, T. (1988). Computer Systems and the Design of Organizational Interaction. Tran. on Office Information Systems. 6(2), pp. 153–172.
Groth, K.; Bowers, J. (2001): On Finding things out: Situated organizational knowledge in CSCW, in: Proceedings of the 7th ECSCW, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 279–298
Hinrichs, J. (2000): Telecooperation in Engineering Offices — The problem of archiving. in: Designing Cooperative Systems (COOP 2000), IOS Press, Amsterdam, pp. 259–274
Hutchins, E. (1995): Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge MA
JCSCW (1995), Several contributions in the Commentary Section, Int. Journal on CSCW 3(1), Kluwer, pp. 29–95
Lutters, W. G.; Ackerman, M. S. (2002): Archiving Safety: A Field Study of Boundary Objects in Aircraft Technical Support, in: Int. Conf. on CSCW’02, New Orleans, LO, ACM Press, New York, pp. 266–275
McDonald, D. W. (2000): Supporting Nuance in Groupware Design: Moving from Naturalistic Expertise Location to Expertise Recommendation, PhD-thesis, University of California, Irvine 2000
McDonald, D. W.; Ackerman, M. (2000): Expertise Recommender: A Flexible Recommendation System and Architecture, in: Int. Conf. On CSCW, ACM Press, New York, pp. 231–240
Pipek, V.; and Won, M. (2002). Communication-oriented Computer Support for Knowledge Management. Informatik/Informatique — Magazine of the Swiss Informatics Societies 2002(1): pp. 39–43.
Smeaton, C; Neilson, I. (1995). The Answer Web. Fourth International World Wide Web Conference 1995, Boston, MA, USA, available upon request from http://www.orbitalsw.com.
Stahl, G.; Herrmann, T. (1999): Intertwining Perspectives and Negotiation; in: Int. Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP’99), ACM Press, New York, pp. 316–325
Suchman, L. (1993). Do Categories Have Politics? The Language/Action Perspective reconsidered. Europ. Conf. on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW’93), Milan, Italy, pp. 1–14.
Trigg, R.H., Blomberg, J. and Suchman, L. (1999): Moving document collections online: The evolution of a shared repository. In: 6th European Conference, Kluwer, Dordrecht, NL, pp. 331–350.
Winograd, T. (1988): A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work. In: Greif, I. (ed.), CSCW — A book of readings, Morgan Kaufman, San Mateo, CA, pp. 623–656.
Wulf, V.; Krings, M.; Stiemerling, O.; Iacucci, G.; Maidhof, M.; Peters, R.; Fuchs-Fronhofen, P.; Nett, B.; Hinrichs, J. (1999): Improving Inter-Organizational Processes with Integrated Organization and Technology Development, in: JUCS, Vol. 5, No. 6, 1999, pp. 339–365
Wulf, V.; Rohde, M. (1995): Towards an Integrated Organization and Technology Development. in: Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’95), (Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 1995), ACM Press, New York, pp. 55–64
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pipek, V., Wulf, V. (2003). Pruning the Answer Garden: Knowledge Sharing in Maintenance Engineering. In: Kuutti, K., Karsten, E.H., Fitzpatrick, G., Dourish, P., Schmidt, K. (eds) ECSCW 2003. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0068-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0068-0_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-3994-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0068-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive