The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Harvard Business Review : 抄録雑誌の概要

Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of organizations. Can information technology help the growth and the sustainment of organizational knowledge? The answer is yes, if care is taken to remember that IT here is just a part of the story (corporate culture and work practices being equally relevant) and that the information technologies best suited for this purpose should be expressly designed with knowledge management in view. This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science contains a selection of papers from the First Conference on Practical Applications of Knowledge Management. Each paper describes a specific type of information technology suitable for the support of different aspects of knowledge management.

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Information technology for knowledge management

Sociological and technical difficulties, such as a lack of informal encounters, can make it difficult for new members of noncollocated software development teams to learn from their more experienced colleagues. To address this situation, we have developed a tool, named Hipikat that provides developers with efficient and effective access to the group memory for a software development project that is implicitly formed by all of the artifacts produced during the development. This project memory is built automatically with little or no change to existing work practices. After describing the Hipikat tool, we present two studies investigating Hipikat's usefulness in software modification tasks. One study evaluated the usefulness of Hipikat's recommendations on a sample of 20 modification tasks performed on the Eclipse Java IDE during the development of release 2.1 of the Eclipse software. We describe the study, present quantitative measures of Hipikat's performance, and describe in detail three cases that illustrate a range of issues that we have identified in the results. In the other study, we evaluated whether software developers who are new to a project can benefit from the artifacts that Hipikat recommends from the project memory. We describe the study, present qualitative observations, and suggest implications of using project memory as a learning aid for project newcomers.

/pdf/hipikat-a-project-memory-for-software-development-4c5q63zecj.pdf

Hipikat: a project memory for software development

This paper investigates how to support work and in particular cooperation in large-scale technical projects. The investigation is based on a case study of a specific Danish engineering company and it uncovers challenges to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in this setting. The company is responsible for management and supervision of one of the world's largest tunnel/bridge construction projects. Our original goal was to determine requirements for CSCW as they unfold in this specific setting as opposed to survey and laboratory investigations. The requirements provide feedback to product development both on specific functionality and as a long term vision for CSCW in such settings. As it turned out, developing our cooperative design techniques in a product development setting also became a major issue. The initial cooperative analysis identified a number of bottlenecks in daily work, where support for cooperation is needed. Examples of bottlenecks are: sharing materials, issuing tasks, and keeping track of task status. Grounded in the analysis, cooperative design workshops based on scenarios of future work situations were established to investigate the potential of different CSCW technologies in this setting. In the workshops, mock-ups and prototypes were used to support end-users in assessing CSCW technologies based on concrete, hands-on experiences. The workshops uncovered several challenges. First, support for sharing materials would require a huge body of diverse materials to be integrated, for example into a hypermedia network. Second, tasks are closely coupled to materials being processed thus a coordination tool should integrate facilities for managing materials. Third, most daily work tasks are event driven and plans change too rapidly for people to register them on a computer. Without meeting these challenges, new CSCW tools are likely to introduce too much overhead to be really useful.

http://cs.au.dk/~kgronbak/homepage/pubs/CACM_CSCW.pdf

CSCW challenges: cooperative design in engineering projects

Collaborating teams of knowledge workers need a common repository in which to share information gathered by individuals or developed by the team. This is difficult to achieve in practice, because individual information access strategies break down with group information—people can generally find things that are on their own messy desks and file systems, but not on other people's. The design challenge in a group memory is thus to enable low-effort information sharing without reducing individuals' finding effectiveness. This paper presents the lessons from our design and initial use of a hypertext-based group memory, TeamInfo. We expose the serious cognitive obstacles to a shared information structure, discuss the uses and benefits we have experienced, address the effects of technology limitations and highlight some unexpected social work impacts of our group memory.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/93/HPL-93-11.pdf

Where did you put it? Issues in the design and use of a group memory

Well-designed reusable class libraries are often incompatible due to architectural mismatches such as error-handling and composition conventions. We identify five pragmatic dimensions along which combinations of subsystems must match, and present detailed examples of conflicts resulting from mismatches. Examples are drawn from our experiences of integrating five subsystem-level class hierarchies into an object-oriented hypertext platform. We submit that effective reuse will require that these pragmatic decisions be explicitly identified in descriptions of reusable software. Such descriptions will enable developers to identify and combine subsystems whose architectures are compatible.

When objects collide experiences with reusing multiple class hierarchies

CSCW, apprenticeship, programmers, remote collaboration tools Informal consulting interactions between apprentices and experts represent a little-studied but common collaborative work practice in many domains. In the computer industry, programmers become apprentices as they retool themselves to new computer languages, programming environments, software frameworks and systems. Our empirical study of consulting interactions has provided insights into the nature of this informal collaborative work practice.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/92/HPL-92-133.pdf

Consultants and apprentices: observations about learning and collaborative problem solving

Platform and application issues in multi-user hypertext

information filtering We discuss the implications of information consumer and producer needs for the provider of basic filtering technology. To understand the consumer point of view, we outline seven different filtering goals that cover a wide variety of filtering questions, including obtaining an overview, identifying a trend, and finding a match between a prototype and an instantiation. We discuss three problems from the producer point of view: structuring information, disseminating information and selecting a medium in which to express information. Both the consumer and producer perspectives are illustrated by examples from the domains of clinical patient care, medical research, and industrial product development.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/91/HPL-91-153.pdf

Lucy M. Berlin

Papers

Where did you put it? Issues in the design and use of a group memory

When objects collide experiences with reusing multiple class hierarchies

Consultants and apprentices: observations about learning and collaborative problem solving

Platform and application issues in multi-user hypertext

Multiple Views on Filtering: Consumers, Producers and Filtering Technology Designers