MATURE Deliverable 1. - Knowledge Maturing

40
• Influence on personal development. Nearly all cases analyzed showed, that continuous learning
was needed in order to execute their tasks. In some cases, advancing on the career path would
greatly be influenced by acquiring new knowledge.
• Formal training . Formal learning in the form of INSET training, continuing professional
development opportunities and formal education courses played a significant role for maintaining
and developing the knowledge of those in contexts responding to rapid change.
• Informal learning and development. Within most of the organizations, the continuous need to
learn and maintain knowledge was an essential element of their job role. Informal learning was an
essential method of maintaining knowledge. For instance, individuals were required to have upto-date
knowledge and information on local education, training and employment opportunities.
However, there were few formal processes for recording, storing and sharing this knowledge.
• Occasion. Nearly all of the cases had in common, that a lot of learning had to be done parallel to
work.
Area 4 (artefacts): Which forms of representation for knowledge or artefacts are important in the
company’s daily operations, e.g., formalized training material, contributions in community platforms,
emails? Why?
• Artefact. Most content types were either documents related to the daily business like project
presentations or meeting protocols or they were knowledge oriented like FAQ-lists, product
documentations or stored answers from colleagues to a certain problem.
• Formalization. Artefacts with all levels of formalization were found.
• Location. There were different specific locations used like file servers or PIM (see Area 5 below).
However, artefacts could be stored in more than one location, especially, if the regarding content
would exist in different stages of formalization.
• Organizational vocabulary. Often the vocabulary used is organisationally prescribed and policy
driven relating to professional identify. Language and vocabularies are shared across, and
embedded within, the organization and comprise part of the knowledge structures.
Area 5: How are individual and group work spaces structured, e.g., own file system, file servers, email
archive? Which concepts are used? Why?
• Type of workspace. All employees personal and one or more group workspaces relevant for their
work.
• Location. The primary location for storing documents and information were file servers and the
PIM. Other, less common locations were wikis, document management systems, portals or
specific application systems.
• Contents. Most content types were either documents related for the daily business like project
presentations or meeting protocols or they were knowledge-oriented like FAQ-lists, product
documentations or stored answers from colleagues to a certain problem (see Area 4).
• Concept. The primary concept for structuring the personal and group workspace was that of a
hierarchy which was, in many cases, sorted by task or time dimension.
• Changeable. Although all personal workspaces were changeable by the employees, a lot of group
workspaces had a fixed structure, whether due to administrative issues or standardization efforts
of the application partner.
• Formats. The workspace of most employees contained typical office formats like MS Word,
Excel, PowerPoint and stored email messages.
• Responsibilities for updating. Depending on the system used for storing information, either
everybody could update specific contents (wiki), or specific roles were defined being responsible
for keeping information and knowledge up-to-date. In addition, there were some examples of not