Preface for the Third Edition - Read

298 B. Concepts and Theories
Contributions to newsgroups. These are regularly email (text) messages with or
without attachments that are sent to discussion lists.
Data base elements. This type of media represents the traditional, structured form
of data storage in hierarchical, network, object-oriented, multi-dimensional or,
most commonly, relational data bases and data warehouses (for an overview of
data base theory, development and systems see e.g., Elmasri/Navathe 1994, Inmon/
Hackathorn 1994, Atzeni et al. 1999, Watson 1999). Data base elements still might
be considered as part of a KMS’s storage system, especially when connected to
richer media like documents, multimedia contents and the interactive side of a
KMS like contributions to newsgroups or email messages.
Organizations with a systematic KM initiative might also include more differing
types of media in their knowledge bases than organizations without one. This
should be especially true for multimedia elements, contributions to newsgroups
and data base elements, whereas traditional documents could represent a smaller
share of the knowledge base. Again, the activities identification, providing access
to and/or documentation of existing knowledge should lead to a greater variety of
types of media used to represent knowledge elements. Therefore, these organizations
should use more variety in the types of media used:
Hypothesis 16: Organizations with systematic KM handle a higher share of multimedia
elements, contributions to newsgroups and data base elements
in their KMS than organizations without such an initiative
7.2.4 Structuring of contents
In addition to type of contents, the size and the media used in KMS, structuring and
organizing the contents is supposed to be one of the key tasks in knowledge management.
There have been many approaches suggested to organize knowledge in
organizations that basically fall into two groups. On the one hand, AI methods are
suggested to support the development of ontologies in organizations (e.g., Staab et
al. 2001). On the other hand, business processes models are used as a starting point
to identify the most critical business knowledge in organizations (e.g., Remus
2002). However, the interviews showed that in the organizations so far mostly
pragmatic approaches are applied. In most cases, the knowledge structure is determined
by a committee in a workshop without much methodical support and then
evolves with new additions to the knowledge base. The investigation of knowledge
structure will therefore be limited to a set of basic criteria to study to what extent
organizations structure and organize their knowledge bases485 .
485. The interested reader will find a host of literature in the AI field that has a long tradition
in dealing with structuring expert systems and knowledge bases and recently has been
applied to broader domains, such as organizational document bases or Intranets (for
links to literature on AI see also section 4.1.1 - “From organizational learning to knowledge
management” on page 22).