Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

Although knowledge transfer has been recognized as one of the critical success factors in outsourcing, there is currently no work systematically reporting on how knowledge transfer is and can be managed in the firms involved in outsourcing relationships. This paper presents results of 12 case-studies analyzing knowledge transfer processes in IT-outsourcing, investigated through 48 structured interviews. The findings identify the main knowledge transfer phases and current practices between outsourcing partners. They are consolidated into a preliminary, empirically-grounded reference model for knowledge transfer in outsourcing. Special attention is given to the analysis of outsourcing-specific knowledge transfer activities and most frequently used knowledge transfer techniques. By analyzing how current practices can be effectively employed or extended to reduce outsourcing-specific knowledge-asymmetries, we provide one of the first contributions to understanding how firms can design, manage and support knowledge transfer as a strategic goal of their outsourcing relationships.

So far, culture has played a minor role in the design of software. Our experience with imbuto, a program designed for Rwandan agricultural advisors, has shown that cultural adaptation increased efficiency, but was extremely time-consuming and, thus, prohibitively expensive. In order to bridge the gap between cost-savings on one hand, and international usability on the other, this paper promotes the idea of culturally adaptive software. In contrast to manual localization, adaptive software is able to acquire details about an individual's cultural identity during use. Combining insights from the related fields international usability, user modeling and user interface adaptation, we show how research findings can be exploited for an integrated approach to automatically adapt software to the user's cultural frame.

Based on an information systems metaphor for virtual communities this paper discusses up-todateness as one crucial factor of travel information quality. Two empirical studies are presented which show that the up-to-dateness of information in travelbooks, wikis and in forum communities does not differ systematically. Based on this empirical evidence we focus on understanding the factors influencing the up-to-dateness of the three media. We propose a framework with three determining factors: 1) the initial up-to-dateness at the time the information is first available for the user 2) the information volatility in a certain domain and 3) the length of the revision cycles. From these factors we hypothesize a) that the initial up-to-dateness is best in travelbooks and worst in forums and b) that the revision cycle is shortest in forums and longest in travelbooks. Since wikis come close the initial up-to-dateness of travelbooks and its revision cycle is almost as short as in forums, we finally argue why we believe wikis to be the most up-to-date medium in the long run.

Navigation systems are generally known from motor vehicle. Founded on the more and more powerful devices such as PDAs and mobile phones are pedestrian navigation systems since some time part of the current research. In the first part of this thesis the basics of navigation systems are illustrated. Among other things it is going into way calculating algorithms and the conditioning of way guidance information. Further we look at some realised pedestrian navigation systems. In the second part of this thesis it is going into the navigation system that has been deployed for the mExplorer. In doing so the architecture, the user interaction and the evaluation of the system are discussed.

Travelers have a high need for up to date and complete information about their destinations. Traditional guide books suffer from several weaknesses. As an alternative, a community based system for travel planning and documentation is created in this thesis. The integration of established tools such as wikis, blogs and forums – with adjustments to satisfy the requirements of travelers – allows for an easy planning and documenting of trips. This is augmented by the addition of geographical data to the system. The developed software has been evaluated in repeated tests and was further enhanced, resulting in an easy understandable, user friendly solution.

mExplorer is a mobile learning game developed by the Institute for Informatics at the University of Zurich. The game is aimed at familiarizing freshmen students with their new surroundings, the campus. Throughout several user tests, it became apparent, that the users were devoting too much attention to the handling of the mobile device, instead of focusing on the surrounding campus, which is the goal of the game. This thesis attempts to successfully diminish or even solve the focus problem by implementing additional context awareness features, an enhanced audible interface and by offering the ability to create location-based reminders. The new features are exposed to the user community in two separate user tests in order to validate and evaluate them. In conclusion we summarize the gained experience in a design guide for mExplorer's future development, which can also be applied to similar mobile learning games.

In the context of the research field „Mobile Learning Games“, there was developed a mobile game environment, which should help students to learn to know the university better. This diploma thesis implements handwriting, voice and photo annotations for the existing Mobile Game application. Because there are always some problems in mobile environments with the underlying network and because these annotations contain a big amount of data, this paper discusses these circumstances and tries to show some solutions. The result is a functional extension of the Mobile Game, which has been confirmed by a user test.

Due to the proceeding virtualisation of the campus by e-learning and the digitalisation of all administrative processes (e.g.: campus management systems) the IT service provider stands in the responsibility to give the intangible university a face. The stakeholders: students, faculty and administration need a contact point to turn to in case of questions, problems or suggestions. With such a heterogeneous target audience, it is a demanding challenge to develop a support organisation which is able to cover the primary needs of all stakeholders. An additional aspect to consider is that European universities are usually decentralized organisations and each unit has a distinct desire for autonomy. Based on eleven case studies and corresponding literature about best practices for support organisations, a reference model has been developed. The model shows how universities can organise their support organisation to satisfy the different needs of their stakeholders. The reference model is designed in ARIS and shall serve universities as a guideline. The case studies show the current support processes at six European universities, three companies from the private sector and two Anglo-Saxon universities. The case studies about the European universities involve the countries Belgium, Germany and Switzerland.

Nowadays so many different means of communication are available that it is hard for us to find something in common with someone else to communicate with each other. Alltough the variety of communication channels and devices raises every day, our reachability seems to have stalled at a certain level. Why is that and what can we do, to increase the use of todays communication possibilities? In this thesis I will analyse our current communication situation and the problems related to it. I will try to find a solution to better deal with the variety and to make it easyer to choose the best communication device available for different situations. I will therefore make use of context information about the recipient in order to manage an incomming request the most pleasing way. A functional protoype will be implemented and tested afterwards.

As a result of organisational and cultural distance, knowledge transfer in outsourcing relationship offers many challenges. To counter these challenges, prior work analyzed and optimized the approach to transfer knowledge in practice. Starting from this reference model this thesis inquires the benefit of process-orientation for the knowledge transfer. The creation of process models provides a basis for a workflow implementation to support the knowledge transfer. The prototype is then evaluated by experts using a walkthrough. The findings of this thesis show the meaningfulness and benefits of workflow support for unstructured processes like the knowledge transfer process. By means of this organizational anchorage it becomes measureable and manageable. Further, the coordination effort of the knowledge workers decreases and therefore the effort to transfer knowledge is lowered. The importance of the the success factor technology especially in outsourcing relationships, where a lot of knowledge needs to be transfered over wide distances, could be shown, thus it must be pursued in further work.

This thesis discusses the information quality factor 'structure' in travel information systems. In the first part structure will be analysed within the field of general computer science. Then a specific framework for travel information systems developed at the Institute of Informatics will propose some hypotheses in which structure is compared to a wiki, an online community and a travel book. Building upon that a new concept is created in which views and scenarios are formed to a EPK-model which serves as an instrument to explore indicators for the structure. These indicators are then discussed, selected and analysed regarding an empirical measurement. For the empirical analysis which is captured on video the user has to answer 10 questions while structure will be measured. The indicators will then be evaluated and compared to the hypotheses proposed at the beginning.

This paper reports on a global initiative to investigate the assimilation of collaborative information technologies (CITs) in task-oriented collaboration. The two classes of CITs explored include conferencing and groupware technologies. Based upon the level of technology access/availability and utilization, four assimilation states are identified. Data collected from 538 organizations in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Norway, and Switzerland is mapped in the four CIT assimilation states. The results indicate that the assimilation patterns of conferencing and groupware technologies vary across the study regions. Overall analyses of the organizational antecedents of CIT assimilation indicate that function integration and promotion of collaboration are significantly associated with the assimilation of conferencing and groupware technologies. Organization size and information technology (IT) function size, on the other hand, were found to be significantly associated only with the assimilation of conferencing technologies. Implications of our findings are discussed for practice and research.

While social and economic aspects of online communities have been investigated broadly, the information exchanged has seldom been the subject of study. The article follows recent work on using an information systems metaphor for online communities: users specify queries and receive information from the online community members. In order to justify this metaphor, information needs to be at least up to classic information products. In this paper we present a framework for the evaluation of timeliness in online communities. An empirical study is presented which compares aspects of timeliness, namely up-to-dateness, for a wiki community and a printed guidebook. Results show that the community is at least as up-to-date as the printed guidebook. While further research is needed, results indicate that online communities can be used as information systems with reasonable information quality values.

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Today, according to the globalisation, meetings between commercial lines and their partner organisations take more and more place in virtual rooms. Two mediums are often used in distance communication, the audio and the chat. The goals of this study and research paper are the use of these technologies on the basis of different experiments according to a determined task. The outcomes will be used for carrying out a hypotheses testing according to the underlying theories of the media choice. Thereby, the suitability of these mediums is checked in groups of different sizes. The aim of this master thesis is to point out, which medium - depending on the situation - suits best for achieving optimal productivity.

Die Ausgangslage für Suchfunktionen auf Unternehmens-Websites stellt sich grundlegend anders dar als bei Internet-Suchdiensten. Nicht die möglichst breite Erschließung von Informationen vieler verschiedener Websites, sondern der erfolgreiche Dialog mit den Nutzern steht im Vordergrund. Das Gelingen dieser Kommunikation wird in diesem Beitrag untersucht. Von 56 Schweizer Unternehmen und Behörden wurde jeweils die Suchfunktion der Website untersucht. Dabei gruppierten sich die insgesamt 74 Einzeltests in die vier Hauptkriterien: Suchindex, Vergleich von Anfragen und Dokumenten, Benutzerinteraktion und Suchergebnisse. Die Resultate zeigen großes Potential für Verbesserungen. Dabei wurden kein Ranking der Websites und keine Auszeichnung im Rahmen der Studie beabsichtigt. Vielmehr wurde auf Basis der Ergebnisse eine Einteilung in gute, mittlere und schlechte Websites für die einzelnen Kriterien durchgeführt. Die Analyse zeigt, dass keine Website in sämtlichen getesteten Kriterien sehr gut abschneidet. Die Studie schließt mit verschiedenen Empfehlungen, die dazu führen können, die Qualität der Suchfunktion wesentlich zu verbessern. Hierbei wird unter anderem empfohlen, der Aktualität und Vollständigkeit des Suchindex besondere Beachtung zu schenken, Metadaten der Dokumentenbasis zu pflegen, bewährte Standards für die Benutzerinteraktion zu beachten und Trefferlisten sowie potenzielle Suchanfragen auch auf eine mögliche Nutzersicht hin zu optimieren.

This workshop contribution presents experiences from our work on supporting exploratory search tasks by using visualization to augment the search process and information sensemaking in a specific domain of cross-community knowledge exchange. We then discuss how the lessons learned here are related and can be transferred to supporting exploratory access to user-generated media collections. The first part presents three main results of our recent work: 1) a concrete visual information interface for explorative, multi-perspective access to community information spaces, 2) an evaluation framework for measuring search performance in terms of user-centered knowledge construction effects and 3) the results of an empirical laboratory study applying this framework to compare the use of a visual information interface (Knowledge Explorer) and a traditional search system (Google). The second part discusses how these experiences are linked to the currently exploding phenomenon of personal and participatory media where huge amounts of information are increasingly produced and shared between users, in a number of different media (audio, photo, video) with no professional mediators and little or no structuring. We argue that user-generated content creation and sharing exhibits structural properties typical for explorative rather than goal-directed search needs. This requires new kinds of search tools integrating collaborative techniques such as community-based content aggregation and filtering with visual exploration interfaces.

Wissensnetzwerke, die unterschiedliche Communities of Practice einbeziehen, spielen eine wichtige Rolle für die Förderung von Innovation in Organisationen. Der gemeinschaftsübergreifende Wissensaustausch wird aber durch unterschiedliche Wissensdomänen, den fehlenden gemeinsamen Kontexts und die geringe Kommunikation erschwert. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert einen Ansatz zur Überwindung solcher Barrieren mittels Wissensvisualisierung. Die entwickelte Methode ermöglicht es, dynamische Wissenskarten zu erstellen, die persönliche und geteilte Perspektiven aus unterschiedlichen Communities abbilden, in Beziehung setzen und für die Informationssuche nutzbar machen. Eine Laborstudie zeigt, wie ein solcher multiperspektivischer Zugang zu Community-Informationsräumen den gemeinschaftsübergreifenden Wissensaustausch unterstützen kann.

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