Gifts, Contexts, Means, and Ends Differing: Informing Task Scenarios to Serve Knowledge Workers’ Needs in Dynamic Complex Settings

Abstract

Aim/Purpose: As traditional Knowledge Management (KM) struggles to support the personal needs of knowledge workers in a new era of accelerating information abundance, we examine the shortcomings and put forward alternative scenarios and architectures for developing a novel Personal KM System (PKMS). Background: While prior publications focused on the complementing features compared to conventional dynamic KM models, our emphasis shifts to instantiating a flourishing PKMS community supported by a Digital Platform Ecosystem. Methodology: Design science research focusing on conceptual analysis and prototyping. Contribution: The PKMS concept advances the understanding of how digital platform communities may serve members with highly diverse skills and ambitions better to gainfully utilize the platform’s resources and generative potential in their personal and local settings. Findings: We demonstrate how the needs to tackle attention-consuming rising entropy and to benefit from generative innovation potentials can be addressed. Future Research: As this article has iteratively co-evolved with the preparing of a PKMS implementation, business, and roll-out plan, the prototype’s testing, completion, and subsequent migration to a viable system is of primary concern.

Reframing a Novel Decentralized Knowledge Management Concept as a Desirable Vision: As We May Realize the Memex

“…Recent publications have detailed how the familiar information-scarcity has transformed into a never-before experienced ever-increasing attention-consuming information abundance by applying the strengths, vulnerability, and intervention assessment related to digital threats (SVIDT) methodology [39,40], by adapting the psycho-social notion of generativity (in line with recent discourses in technology and innovation) [36,41], and by pinpointing the (neg)entropic consequences [42,43]. Some of the resulting unsustainable challenges and fixations encountered are highlighted in Figure 4 (to be further elaborated on).…”

“…DPEs are generically defined as meta-artefacts which afford clients with highly diverse skills (gifts) and ambitions (ends) to gainfully utilize its resources and generative potential (means) in their personal and local settings (contexts) [80]. An article has used the gifts-contextsmeans-ends perspective to point out the additional complexities such a DPE faces compared to organizational KMS [43].…”

“…PKMSs-from a demand-side-empowering perspective-present proficient users and their professional habitats with an arsenal of enabling affordances [46] based on synergies within a PKMS-DPE environment. They promise to sustainably narrow or eliminate opportunity divides via effective low-cost KM applications, ease of knowledge access/use/creation, and adherence to vital PKM provisions currently not catered for which positively affect ownership, consistency, stability, collaborativeness, and absorptive capacity in personal contexts [43,49,116].…”

Projectability and Heritage Management of Design Knowledge: A Grass-Roots Artefact Perspective of a Longitudinal Research Project for Knowledge Management System Innovation

“…The PKMS's Digital Platform Ecosystem (DPE) (Figure 3) fits this category of a metaartefact/system as it is meant to accommodate social actors with highly diverse skills (gifts), expectations, and ambitions (ends) to gainfully use the DPEs' resources and generative potential (means) in their personal and local environment (contexts) [16,23]. It follows that any of the PKMS-relevant artefacts (see examples in Figure 4) may only apply to some of the three subsystem or ecosystem levels (Figure 3 and Table 2) and that cross-level interdependencies have to be catered for in the design processes.…”

“…The effects are widening sustainability gaps in the form of opportunity ('digerati' and 'have-nots' [34]) and innovation divides [35] driven by, for example, accelerating information entropy [36], invisible work [37], structural holes [38,39], and undiscoverable public knowledge [40], all further systemically discussed in a prior paper [41]. As the current "traditional knowledge creation models were all devised in the bygone era of information scarcity" when "today's digital abundance and entropy were beyond their makers' comprehension" [23], their methodical repertoire neither provides for the detection of these risks nor adequate responses. KM's entropic drivers mentioned in this paragraph have probably done more harm to the cumulativeness and evolution of scientific extelligence and transdisciplinary scholarship than the causes cited in all the previous sections.…”