Ubiquitous knowledge management - enabling an office-work scheduling tool for corporate knowledge sharing

Abstract

This paper analyzes ubiquitous knowledge sharing among office workers. Most office workers use a schedule management system and their schedule data are also shared with other workers for group schedule management. Empirical analyses have taught us that the direct use of schedule data is the key to successful ubiquitous knowledge sharing amongst busy white-collar workers. The authors have been developing "KM Goodinator (Knowledge Management Group Coordinator)", a ubiquitous knowledge management tool that runs with commercial schedule management groupware. The tool handles schedule data as a knowledge repository that includes: (1) a human relationship database; (2) a who-knows-what directory; and (3) a scheduling knowledge database. Because the system allows users to use schedule data as knowledge without maintaining the knowledge database, ubiquitous knowledge sharing is easily achieved. Although knowledge retrieval performance is not as good as more integrated knowledge management systems, the easy-to-adopt feature of the approach should be welcomed by busy organizations.