Preface for the Third Edition - Read

556 C. State of Practice
the (integrative) KMS functions. Functions bridging integrative and interactive
KMS broadly fall into the three categories:
knowledge search and presentation,
knowledge acquisition, publication and organization,
administration.
The order of the functions as presented in Figure C-27 is the same as in the two
sections before.
0%
knowledge search and presentation
20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
intelligent agents 3 4 8 7 1
29
navigation from k. elements to
authors/communities 2 8 9 2 1
26
access statistics for k. elements 2 7 7 4 1
29
access paths to k. elements/clusters 2 7 3 5 2
28
user profiles 3 6 5 3
22
development/management of k. maps 2 2 8 4
35
presentation of related k. elements 2 3 1 1
40
presentation of k. elements in maps
knowledge acquisition, publication and
organization
4 3
40
definition of roles for participants 8 7 6 4 5
21
feedback from participants to authors 3 7 6 7 5
20
automatic notification of
potentially interested
administration
5 5 4 5 3
28
administration of group profiles/privileges 11 9 6 3 5
20
personalization of user interface 1 4 5 2 12
28
role-specific configurations of KMS 6 5 4 3 5
29
always often sometimes rarely never no such function
FIGURE C-27. KMS functions bridging integrative and interactive KM
Knowledge search and presentation. Generally, bridging functions supporting
knowledge search and presentation were implemented in a minority of the organizations.
On average, only about a third of the organizations (34.6%) had implemented
this type of functions. However, of those organizations which actually had
implemented these functions, usage was quite high (average of all means: 2.98,
average of all medians: 3.00). This is especially true for functions supporting the
link between knowledge elements and their use by participants, such as navigation
from knowledge elements to authors/communities (mean: 3.36, median: 3.00),
access statistics for knowledge elements (mean: 3.24, median: 3.00), access paths
to knowledge elements/clusters (mean: 3.11, median: 3.00) as well as for user profiles
(mean: 3.53, median: 4.00). User profiles support a personalization of a participant’s
search domain or strategy. Intelligent agents were implemented most frequently
of all the search and presentation functions bridging integrative and interactive
KM, but in two thirds of the cases (65.2%) they were only used sometimes
or rarely at all.
Visualization of relationships between knowledge elements on the one hand and
participants and/or experts on the other hand can be found in knowledge maps