Supporting authors in documenting and sharing operative knowledge
| Published date | 13 August 2018 |
| Date | 13 August 2018 |
| Pages | 451-467 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2017-0038 |
| Author | Davide Rossi,Angelo Di Iorio |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
Supporting authors in
documenting and sharing
operative knowledge
Davide Rossi and Angelo Di Iorio
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Universita degli Studi di Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to design and evaluate an authoring tool to support users in documenting
knowledge using social software-based platforms in order to improve information sharing within organizations.
Facilitating the creation of such content has been identified as a critical point for the acceptance of similar platforms.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors propose a gen eral framework to desig n and assess
technological solut ions that positively affects users’contribution –and, as a consequence, users’
engagement –when knowle dge is externalized, made persistent and shared by using semant ic wikis. The
definition of the frame work has been derived fro m a case study on operati onal knowledge manage ment.
This framework revolve s around interaction with actual users for both design and eval uation. The latter
exploits usability tes ts based on the System Usability Scale and analy sis based on the grounded theory.
Findings –The framework proved to be effective when applied for a solution for the authors’case study. The
results of the designed tool were well accepted, and the tool was characterized by its users as having high
usability. A limitation that emerged is related to the ability to support authors not just in creating
documentation but also in maintaining it, an aspect that needs to be better addressed in the future.
Originality/value –The presented framework can be instantiated for similar platforms and provides a
common ground for assessment of tools. The produced tool significantly simplifies the production of
documentation related to community best practices. Valuable user feedbacks were collected about possible
improvements for tools supporting authors.
Keywords Wikis, Web 2.0, Knowledge management, Social software
Paper type Technical paper
Introduction
The advent of the Web 2.0 haschanged the way we access information. Documents, intended
as media for representing information, have changed as well. New forms of electronic
documentsdeserve the same attention paidto printed texts in the past: collectively edited wiki
pages, as those available on Wikipedia, can be as authoritative as a book stored in a national
library (Lankes, 2008).
These documents do not only differ in their physical appearance: Web 2.0 also adds a
social dimension to creation, maintenance and sharing of documents; this is the reason why
we usually refer to Web 2.0 applications as social software.
This dimension not only impacts the private lives of individuals but is also becoming
prominent within organizations, as in the case of Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006), mostly as
“lightweight”knowledge management options. As some authors say, Web 2.0 is becoming
the new knowledge management platform (Davenport, 2008).
While the statement is arguably an exaggeration meant to draw the attention of
researchers, there are several points of contact between social software tools and knowledge
management tools. In the recent past, the disciplined use of social software, mostly wikis,
has been proposed for creating, refining and sharing knowledge within communities. The
case of Wikipedia is exemplar. The system, in fact, is one of the most accessed sources of
information today and relies on millions of contributors.
Wikis have been successfully used in smaller contexts as well, and the exploitation of
social software to support knowledge management has been proved for both organizational
Online Information Review
Vol. 42 No. 4, 2018
pp. 451-467
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-02-2017-0038
Received 2 February 2017
Revised 13 June 2017
29 June 2017
Accepted 19 July 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
451
Supporting
authors
in sharing
knowledge
and personal use. Several researchers have surveyed enterprise wikis, showing that these
platforms are sustainable in long-term projects too and that their open editing model
contributes to creating shared knowledge bases within companies (Poole and Grudin, 2010;
Kussmaul and Jack, 2009; Sousa et al., 2010).
Many others also studied the capabilities of wikis as learning tools. Starting from the
comparison of two MediaWiki and TWiki installations, Chu et al. (2013) identified the key
features that impact more positively on the adoption of wikis by either students or teachers
in higher education. Lai et al. (2016) also investigated how learning is affected by different
forms of collaboration, identifying the most effective collaboration patterns that students
adopt when sharing learning sources via wikis. The research of Du et al. (2016) is also worth
citing here: they studied the adoption of wikis at different levels of education, ranging from
primary school to university.
Razmerita et al. (2009) focused on how personal knowledge can be managed by using
social software and, in particular, wikis. They proved that new forms of formal and
information communication and collaboration have been made possible by these tools. They
also showed that the advantages go beyond the personal sphere, and social software can
ease the circulation of knowledge within organizations. The transformation of personal
knowledge into organizational knowledge, and in the opposite direction, has been studied by
Zhang (2009), who also proposed some guidelines to maximize such knowledge circulation.
One of the issues usually faced in the deployment of these social software solutions is the
ability to build lively virtual communities, with users’contributions being one of the key
success factors (Holtzblatt et al., 2010). In order to increase the users’contribution, it is
possible to operate by either increasing benefits or reducing effort (Cyr and Chun, 2010).
Strategies based on social recognition or other social dynamics operate by increasing the
perceived benefits (Treem and Leonardi, 2012). Particularly interesting is the work of Wang
and Wei (2011). The authors studied the forces that contribute to the successful adoption of
a wiki as a knowledge-sharing platform. They developed a theoretical model and applied it
to survey more than two hundred wiki users, concluding that wikis are pushed by three
main drivers: member interactions, community participation and community promotion.
In this paper, we focus on the other facet: effort reduction. More specifically, we
investigate if, in the context of the aforementioned platforms, technological solutions can
effectively impact this dimension. By technological solutions we mainly refer to authoring
tools to be integrated into the existing platform.
Of course, a general response to this question is not reasonable, given the wide variety of
knowledge management-related social software platforms, their technologies, the
communities they support and so on.
Our proposal is to define a general framework through which these technological
solutions can be designed and assessed; this framework can then be used in the context of
KnowBest, an existing knowledge-sharing platform based on social software, for which we
developed an authoring-support tool: WikiRecPlay.
KnowBest is a framework that leverages social software and semantic web technologies
to elicit and share emergent knowledge (Di Iorio et al., 2014). It targets a specific kind of
knowledge, the so called how-to knowledge, which is operational knowledge that can be
represented as a sequence of actions; such knowledge has also been referred with the term
organizational best practices (Di Iorio et al., 2009).
KnowBest is restricted, by design, to Web 2.0-centered practices, which are practices that
involve interaction with social software or web applications in general.
The tool we implemented to lower the authoring effort in KnowBest is WikiRecPlay, a
web browser extension that allows users to record web navigation sessions with the intent
of describing organizational best practices. These sessions can be edited and transferred
into a semantic wiki back-end where they are published, in the appropriate format and with
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