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Ingbert Schmidt

Knowing What Knowledge to Manage: What Knowledge is Worth Documenting, What Documents are Worth Keeping, and When is Documentation Too Much?. Ingbert Schmidt. What kind of knowledge is important to document, and what kind of knowledge ends up being intellectual clutter?

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Ingbert Schmidt

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  1. Knowing What Knowledge to Manage: What Knowledge is Worth Documenting, What Documents are Worth Keeping, and When is Documentation Too Much? Ingbert Schmidt • What kind of knowledge is important to document, and what kind of knowledge ends up being intellectual clutter? • When is it important to keep documents, and when are they better discarded? • Organizational setting, task-based users/patrons • Converting how-to knowledge into procedural instructions in some kind of manual is difficult (Brown & Duguid 1991) – But still has value (KM) • Studies focus on nature of knowledge, individual and group learning, culture, identity, communities of practice, teams, and organizational structures

  2. Study Design & Method • Union of Graduate Students – High turnover organization: active members average 1 year • ~2700 members; ~80-100 active members • Large archive, active storage, minimal retrieval • 6-8 filing cabinets; shelves of binders; 40 Gb of files mostly text & images; Google Docs; Dropbox; Mailman Archive • Bargaining & Grievance archives are actively used. • Examined intergenerational preservation of “how-to” knowledge by studying knowledge communication practices around documents • Participant observation, unstructured interviews, document analysis • Sociotechnical (Ecological) Design approach

  3. Findings & Recommendations • Original documents are more valuable than making summaries or other “manuals” (G) • Unpredictable how documents will be useful • Originals facilitate multiple uses, summaries are optimized for a single use • Originals easier, more meaningful to read (intent) • “What” is far less important than “How”! (B) • People know the “what”, they do it everyday • They read “what” documents for clues as to “How” • “What” is only important for specialized purposes • May be site specific

  4. Findings & Recommendations Cont’d • Archives organized around user tasks are best (B) • Start creating archives while your knowledge acquisition is fresh • Because you remember what it was like to learn it • People are primary way of finding documents (G) • Due to difficulty of subject classification, when search archive, either census or meaningful sampling needed • Documents need to be talked through to be useful, so pair them with people (S,Sw) • Or context obtained in some other way • Information overload: right chunks of wrong info better than all info at once; discard, try again (Sw)

  5. Findings & Recommendations Cont’d • Creating the manual still might be a good idea • Opportunity for synthesis and reflection (S) • Collects all the pieces in one place • Repurpose for later use • Be careful when describing the org’s history • Say: “This is what we did, and this is why it worked” • Hear: “We need to do things this way because it worked” • Conclusions? • Archive (selected) originals as exemplars • Select documents that show “How” over “What” • Don’t write a manual, talk through exemplars • Organize documents based on task structure

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