KNOWLEDGE CAPITALIZATION IN AN ORGANIZATION SOCIAL

NETWORK

Etienne Deparis

1,2

, Marie-H

ene Abel

, Ga

elle Lortal

and Juliette Mattioli

Universit de Technologie de Compigne, UMR CNRS 6599 Heudiasyc

Centre de Recherches de Royallieu, 60205 Compigne cedex, France

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

, Microsoft and Social Connector for Out-

look

). 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

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.

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

 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

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

stream, the API

providing

habit, etc.

http://www.mondeca.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

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

– 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

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

, 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

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

. 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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