KNOWLEDGE CAPITALIZATION IN AN ORGANIZATION SOCIAL
NETWORK
´
Etienne Deparis
1,2
, Marie-H
´
el
`
ene Abel
1
, Ga
¨
elle Lortal
2
and Juliette Mattioli
2
1
Universit de Technologie de Compigne, UMR CNRS 6599 Heudiasyc
Centre de Recherches de Royallieu, 60205 Compigne cedex, France
2
Thales Research & Technology, Decision Technologies and Mathematics Lab
Campus Polytechnique, 1 Avenue Augustin Fresnel, 91767 Palaiseau cedex, France
Keywords:
Collaborative tool, Organization information system, Social network, Social web, Web 2.0.
Abstract:
Organizations need to face the rapid growth of social networks and its adoption by their collaborators. While
organizations require collaborative tools to get their work done, their collaborators seem to prefer social tools
like Facebook or Twitter. We present in this article a new kind of organizational Content Management System
that takes care of both documentary and social sources of knowledge.
1 INTRODUCTION
Organizations need to face the rapid growth of so-
cial networks and its adoption by their collaborators.
Many enterprise services providers have added such
features to their flagship products (Salesforce and
Chatter
1
, Microsoft and Social Connector for Out-
look
2
). These features let enterprises benefit from
their social capital and ease the communication be-
tween collaborators generating a good atmosphere for
innovation (McAfee, 2006a). Nevertheless, these so-
cial softwares still do not correlate with the classical
information systems, and viewed as separate knowl-
edge source.
This distinction of status in Organization Informa-
tion Systems (OIS) causes a loss of knowledge for the
organization, due to the poor capitalization of social
information. In this paper, we present a finely inte-
grated model of a social network in an OIS and how
to capitalize social information in the same way than
other organization information documents, wiki,
etc.
After having described our interest to develop
what we call a Social Organization Content Man-
agement System (SOCMS), we will define the pri-
mary features such a system must provide. Then we
1
http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/
press-releases/2009/11/091118.jsp Note: all URL in this
article were accessible on Mai 8th, 2011.
2
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/social-
connector-HA101794273.aspx
present a model of this system. We will eventually
see how and why we implement this model in the E-
MEMORAe 2.0 project before concluding.
2 INTEREST FOR A SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION CMS
Organizations have always had to deal with huge
amounts of information. For a long time this infor-
mation was stored in paper archives and not easily
usable. With the increase of digital archives and as-
sociated search engine, information retrieval became
instantaneous and organizations seem to have won an
important battle against its own internal knowledge
management.
However, this “over-availability” of data did not
drive to efficiency. Another problem organizations
meet in their daily information management tasks is
the duality in the origin of information. With this doc-
ument centric approach, relevant information is often
seen as coming only from documentary fragments.
But as the recent growth of social network proves,
user and more specifically social fragments produced
on social networks (Deparis et al., 2011) can also be
viewed as knowledge sources.
Users themselves can be viewed as part of the
Organization Information System (OIS) because they
hold valuable information on the organization and
keep part of the organization’s knowledge.
217
Deparis É., Abel M., Lortal G. and Mattioli J..
KNOWLEDGE CAPITALIZATION IN AN ORGANIZATION SOCIAL NETWORK.
DOI: 10.5220/0003665102170222
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2011), pages 217-222
ISBN: 978-989-8425-81-2
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
Collaborators are not alone in organizations and
build communities around various topics. These com-
munities of practice ((Wenger, 1998) and (Wenger
et al., 2002)) share problems, concerns, but also solu-
tions or try to resolve their problems with continuous
development of their indepth knowledge around their
topic of choice. Knowledge in organizations can be
discovered in such networks of interactive people, as
thought by (Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Already in
1998, they showed that organizations should formal-
ize such internal and informal networks.
The activities driven by these communities leave
tracks in the OIS. But OIS are not ready to capital-
ize nor capture this new kind of information, and the
knowledge fragment they possibly hold are lost, be-
cause nothing exists yet to permit their indexing, re-
trieval and valorisation.
The problem organizations have to face is to as-
sociate their social based information with their clas-
sical content management system, in order to per-
form complete searches which take care of all pos-
sible knowledge sources. This raises complications,
including the high contextual origin, multiple forms,
etc. of such information. This leads specify a new
generation of OIS: the Social Organization Content
Management System (SOCMS). These systems inte-
grate the social and classical fragments of the organi-
zation in one centralized and easily accessible Knowl-
edge Base.
3 PERTINENT FEATURES FOR A
SOCMS
As (Ermine, 2000) presented, modern OIS require
three main features. We have slightly adapted his list
to fit our vision of a SOCMS:
1. Knowledge capitalization;
2. Information sharing;
3. Knowledge creation (i.e. innovation).
3.1 Knowledge Capitalization
The key point of a SOCMS is the capitalization of all
the fragments from the OIS. This means that even
fragments produced on Web 2.0 tools i.e. social
fragments (Deparis et al., 2011) have to be capi-
talized alongside the documentary ones. It is done by
sharing common concepts over the OIS to easily feed
the organization Knowledge Base. All of the collab-
orators’ activities must refer to the same vocabulary,
defined in a central ontology.
This capitalization process follows the same ideas
than the semantic portal solution sold by Mondeca
3
in
the industry.
3.2 Information Sharing
Today’s Organization Information System (OIS) does
not take into account the social fragments which are
immediately lost after publication. But social frag-
ments does not mean senseless fragment. That is why
we recommend the creation of a SOCMS. As we have
said, it is a new generation of Content Management
System (CMS), which allows organizations to capi-
talize Knowledge from social activities.
As (Davenport and Prusak, 1998) showed, groups
of collaborators must be taken more into considera-
tion and need to be formalized. In order to do that,
we suggest that SOCMS integrate sharing spaces,
where collaborators can easily interact with each oth-
ers. These sharing spaces improve the overall collab-
oration of a team or an organization by facilitating ex-
change processes. They involve different sort of user
groups inside the organization. Two types of sharing
spaces must be distinguished: the institutional ones,
created by some executive and the dynamic ones, led
by users’ will.
The user groups around these sharing spaces gen-
erate social activity and, as shown by (Fisher et al.,
2006) with the example of exchanges on Usenet
–, any electronic media which allows users to talk
to many others can be viewed as social networks,
as users will continue to use them to build micro-
societies around various topics.
The aim of a SOCMS and its sharing spaces is
to provide a new type of collaborative platform. In-
side the sharing spaces, collaboration is carried out
by many different tools.
The main activity of users on a collaborative plat-
form is to share information. This information can be
documents, URLs, or any other resources produced or
added to the platform.
We can also define another type of exchange:
when a user adds an annotation to a resource or when
he joins a thread on the forum or modifies a wiki page,
he is sharing his knowledge with his collaborators,
and this exchange leaves tracks in the OIS.
It is also important to provide all possible mean-
ing for them to follow the last events on the platform.
Web 2.0 has introduced various types of technology
to achieve this, like RSS
4
stream, the API
5
providing
habit, etc.
3
http://www.mondeca.com/
4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web API
KMIS 2011 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
218
When they come back on the platform, the activity
stream shows them what other users had done, opti-
mizing the overall collaboration process.
3.3 Knowledge Creation
As (Ermine, 2000) presented, enterprises have to be
innovative and thus to be creative. The creation pro-
cess goes today through constant collaboration of the
members of the enterprise.
The Web 2.0 tools (O’Reilly, 2009) allow easily
this collaboration and so have enterprises recently fol-
lowed the Web 2.0 and adapted it to their needs, creat-
ing what is commonly called “Enterprise 2.0” move-
ment (McAfee, 2006b).
This movement drives new practices into the orga-
nizations, particularly with new management method,
i.e. flattening of hierarchical structure and revital-
ization of collaboration between enterprise members.
Enterprise 2.0, as for Web 2.0, which is not a real rev-
olution, pushed however new tools in the OIS in order
to improve collaborators’ exchanges.
SOCMS does not replace any software in the
OIS. It tries to fill the gap among documentary OIS
and other collaborative tools the organization has de-
ployed over the years.
These new collaborative tools include blogs, wiki,
fora, calendar, document management, etc. Commer-
cial offers exist already like Livelink
6
a complete
suite of tools which combine chat, blog farm, wiki
etc.
But in their current implementation, no global in-
dexing solutions exist. Fragments stay in their orig-
inal data stores and cannot be shared through differ-
ent tools. For example a wiki page can not be easily
linked to a forum post other than giving a senseless
URL.
4 OUR MODEL OF A SOCMS
The model of a SOCMS follows the required features
we identified in the previous section.
4.1 Knowledge Capitalization
A SOCMS is a CMS and so its main purpose is to
provide all the features we need to capitalize the or-
ganization information. With the help of an ontology,
information is semantically indexed in the Knowledge
Base. This permit an interesting way of information
6
http://www.opentext.com/2/global/products/products-
all/livelink-landing.htm
retrieval, with the possibility of browsing in the con-
ceptual network of the organization.
The SOCMS is designed on a domain ontology
which helps to give sense to the structure of the sys-
tem by defining the concepts of groups, users, the dif-
ferent kinds of resources, etc. Resources are them-
selves indexed in application ontologies where groups
can define the concepts they handle, as depicted in
Figure 1.
4.2 Information Sharing
SOCMS must capitalize both documents and social
fragments in different sharing spaces owned by their
respective groups. This ensures that both documen-
tary and social information are available and equally
reusable for the users of the system. As seen in Sec-
tion 3.2 and depicted in Figure 1, these spaces should
be of two types : the institutional ones and the dy-
namic ones.
1. Institutional Spaces are entities, who have been
created by some hierarchical entity, i.e. an exec-
utive has gathered some people who follows the
same training course and may have some docu-
ments to share to each others.
2. Dynamic Spaces describe two different situations:
a user wants to create a community around a
precise topic;
a user wants to create a community of people
with whom he wants to talk and invites them to
join.
A sharing space belongs to only one group, so one
has to be part of this group if he wants access to all the
information exchanged on a particular space. Never-
theless, a user can be part of several different groups.
We reproduce here the reality of organizations where
collaborators take part in different communities
institutional project groups or dynamic groups like
swimming pool team mates or office mates. It is not
because he is at one point with one group that he in-
stantly forgets what he did or shared with other com-
munities. He thus becomes a master piece, a pivot
between two groups inside the organization for exam-
ple, that could be viewed as a potential starting point
for collaboration among these groups.
4.3 Knowledge Creation
By using the Web 2.0 tools provided by the platform,
users produce new fragments or share them inside or
among the groups they belong to. These fragments
KNOWLEDGE CAPITALIZATION IN AN ORGANIZATION SOCIAL NETWORK
219
Figure 1: Excerpt of our model of a SOCMS.
can be blog posts, forum messages or less conven-
tionally opt-in of users for a group, or tagging a user
to a resource.
All these activities are stored to allow later reuse.
Users can then share this new fragments with each
others or simply retrieve an information they need.
The availability of both social and documen-
tary information permit a monitoring activity on the
knowledge base. With only documentary infor-
mation, executive had a project oriented view on
the knowledge of the organization: when a project
started, what materials it concerned, what patent it
created etc. With the addition of the social fragments
they access a more global vision including who are
involved in a project, which team, and how collabo-
rators achieve the different goals of a project. This
can possibly help executive to identify new ideas to
explore and innovative way to follow.
5 E-MEMORAe 2.0
The aim of the MEMORAe project is to model and
design a collaborative platform facilitating organiza-
tional learning and knowledge management. Follow-
ing previous work around knowledge management,
semantic Web and Web 2.0 best practices, the project
has built an e-learning organizational memory based
on ontologies (Leblanc and Abel, 2009).
E-MEMORAe 2.0
7
, the environment designed dur-
ing work on the project, defines the knowledge of an
organization in an ontology, and let its users navigate
in this ontology to retrieve the resources indexed.
E-MEMORAe 2.0 already allows an administrator
to define several groups of users which share a com-
mon point of view on an ontology. Several Web 2.0
tools i.e. wikis, fora, chat, blogs are yet imple-
mented in the platform (Leblanc and Abel, 2008) and
can directly interact with the ontology.
Although the actual implementation does not al-
low dynamic community to appear, the fine integra-
tion of Web 2.0 tools to an ontology and the existence
of institutional groups ease the design of a prototype.
So, we chose the E-MEMORAe 2.0 environment
as basis platform to complete an implementation of
this prototype. It takes the form of an alignment of
the E-MEMORAe 2.0 internal domain ontology and
our model and the development of suitable interfaces
to manage dynamic groups and social fragments cap-
italization.
6 E-MEMORAe 2.0 AS
PROTOTYPE
The E-MEMORAe 2.0 environment has been built
with a strong notion of institutional groups, due to its
primary dedication to e-learning, where groups stand
7
http://www.hds.utc.fr/memorae/
KMIS 2011 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
220
Figure 2: View of the E-MEMORAe 2.0 environment, featuring an e-learning collaborative platform.
Figure 3: Workflow of dynamic group creation.
for classes of students, organized by a teacher.
A group shares a particular point of view on the
resources indexed in the central ontology. Inside this
view, users are able to share with the other members
of the group any resource they want, from article to
forum message, through annotation or Web page. Fig-
ure 2 shows the representation of these views in the
environment.
Exchange of resources is only accessible within
group members of a particular sharing space. No
one from any other group would be able to access
these resources, unless one shares explicitly one re-
source with another group by dragging and dropping
the resource between the different views e.g. be-
tween the institutional group “organization” and the
dynamic group “gp3”.
KNOWLEDGE CAPITALIZATION IN AN ORGANIZATION SOCIAL NETWORK
221
The “create new group” button in the “group dis-
play option” frame in Figure 2 shows how simple it
is for a collaborator to initiate a new dynamic group
around either himself to talk about various topics after
having invited some people, or the concept he is cur-
rently viewing in the ontology view. Figure 3 shows
the popup window where the user can define which
kinds of dynamic group he wants to create. We rely
on the current implementation of the E-MEMORAe
2.0 platform for the institutional groups.
7 CONCLUSIONS
In this article, we present our vision of a Social Orga-
nization Content Management System (SOCMS), as
we think it is a solution to the problem many organi-
zations need to face, when they try to capitalize new
kinds of information from social network tools and
collaborative platforms.
We designed a model of such a system, then a
prototype around this model. The prototype will be
tested in an industrial context with projects tracking
in Thales, and in an academic context at the Univer-
sit de Technologie de Compigne where students will
use it to capitalize information they found during a
technological watch. These experiments will serve for
the evaluation of the prototype and more generally the
model.
We are working on the alignement of our model
on top of several current semantic web vocabularies:
FoaF, SIOC, SKOS and BIBO
8
. This alignement will
allow interoperability between the prototype and oth-
ers related projects.
All of these works related to collaboration and
tracks reuse raise privacy concerns too, which have
to be treated carefully.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research is funded as part of a DGA-CIFRE the-
sis.
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