I know - it has been quite a while between blogs, and when I have blogged it has been rather frivolous. The main reason: I’m spending most of my time looking after Annalena (and a bit of time helping her with her own blog).

But despite mainly being “Dr Dad”, I have been doing some KM related work. I’ve uploaded a draft of a new paper, which I’ll be presenting at the OLKC2006 Conference at the University of Warwick, UK, Monday 20th March – Wednesday 22nd March 2006. The paper is titled “Supporting organisational knowledge work: Integrating thinking and doing in task-based support.” Here’s the abstract:

This paper focuses on what Davenport (2005) terms the Integration Model of knowledge work: relatively routine collaborative knowledge work. The main purpose of this paper is to look at the requirements for supporting this form of work, which we term organisational knowledge work. The approach adopted here is built on the theoretical framework of the Task-based Knowledge Management (TbKM) approach pioneered by Burstein & Linger (2005). Rather than focusing on the management of knowledge in an organisation, we focus on supporting knowledge work in an organisational setting. We draw our conclusions from empirical studies into knowledge-work settings which look closely at the work of weather forecasters.

The main conclusion of this paper is that effective knowledge work support must involve the integration of the doing and thinking dimensions of knowledge work activity, and therefore must support both the productive and cognitive dimensions of knowledge work. Our study also reveals a crucial weakness with Davenport’s characterisation of knowledge work. In particular, Davenport’s scheme gives no account of the relationship between the pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of knowledge work, and gives a flawed account of the relationship between individual and group knowledge work in cases of collaborative activity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under KM Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.