If centralised knowledge bases do not align with the 'natural' knowledge behaviour of people, say our knowledge animal behaviour, what does? I and my colleagues believe knowledge maps do. However, I/we see not just the positive side of knowledge maps. What do you think?
In the work I do with my colleagues, ?knowledge maps? are aggregations and visualisations of information and communication aimed to provide easier access to the information and knowledge that is available within an organisation. Knowledge maps are automatically generated from the existing systems.
As my colleague Wolf puts it: "In terms of the information-foraging jungle, knowledge-mapping technology cuts away the bushes and the undergrowth, exposing traces and territories more clearly than they were before."
It makes individual traces more clearly visible, and it can also make people?s territories easier to recognise. An interesting research question is how this change in visibility triggers changes in people?s behaviour. The extent to which knowledge mapping exposes traces and territories depends on the focus of the knowledge-mapping system in question. Different systems may have different focuses and will thereby trigger different changes in behaviour. From an individual?s point-of-view, making traces more visible is on the one hand positive because it can be used to raise the individual?s awareness of other people?s knowledge and to ease information and knowledge seeking in organisations. In addition, it provides the opportunity to display one?s own traces and territory more prominently, so others are able to find you or the documents you write better. On the other hand, it is also negative in the sense that it becomes much harder to hide the traces one does not want to be seen. Also traces may mislead people who search for information and knowledge, in case traces are followed at times they are not relevant anymore.
To conclude knowledge maps have the potential to make knowledge traces that people leave visible and this in turn may facilitate searching for information and knowledge. Currently however, the visibility of knowledge traces has an unknown impact on the information and knowledge behaviour of people.
For me it is an intriguing questions how we /humans will change our 'knowledge animal' behaviour when traces are more visible. And what will organisations do with that, for the better and the worse (big brother)?
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