Treffer: Information Intensive Systems: Enabler or Inhibitor of Sustained Knowledge Capability.

The ability to leverage the potentials of knowledge capabilities has become an essential source of competitiveness for many organizations. Information systems have been considered to be a fundamental catalyst in increasing performance in working with organizational knowledge. However, there is growing disillusion regarding the capabilities of information intensive systems to facilitate the work with knowledge. In many studies, information technology has been presented as an inhibitor of emerging and unpredictable knowledge work rather than its enabler. One sustained challenge for research lies in exploring novel ways, which enable to overcome the pitfalls of technology while still reaping its potential benefits in working with knowledge. The particular objectives of our study are to (1) explore the ability of information intensive mechanisms to facilitate sustainable knowledge capability and (2) to design, implement and evaluate information intensive mechanisms to create and access complex information in alignment with natural ways of working with knowledge. In pursuit of the first objective of this research, an extensive review of the knowledge management literature as well as related business and computing disciplines is conducted. The synthesized conclusions drawn from this review are postulated as guidelines for designing information intensive knowledge support systems: (1) connect contexts through information, (2) be aware that situational context and structural parameters of the same are mutually constitutive, (3) focus on individuals as mediators of knowledge flows, and (4) be aware of both the benefits and costs of information. In fulfilment of the second objective, a prototypical information intensive knowledge-support system in alignment with aforementioned guidelines has been implemented. This prototype: (1) works with generic networks of information in order to be able to adapt to versatile and unpredictable contexts, (2) allows gradual imposition of syntactical rules on complex information in order to reflect structural constraints in different degrees of severity, (3) allows individuals to design personalized gateways into complex organizational information networks and (4) endeavours to minimize interference in emergent knowledge processes potentially caused by information intensive systems. The prototype is implemented in Java utilizing the frameworks Google Web Toolkit, XStream and the Jena Semantic Web Framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]