Designing the new intranet

Dick Stenmark

A thesis submitted to the Gothenburg University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Publicly defended on March 8, 2002, at 14.00 hour,
Department of Informatics, main floor, Viktoriagatan 13, Göteborg, Sweden

Advisor: Prof. Bo Dahlbom, Department of Informatics, Göteborg University
Opponent: Prof. Brian Fitzgerald, University of Limerick, Ireland
Committee members: Prof. Sture Hägglund, Linköping University;
Prof. Eric Monteiro, NTNU, Trondheim;
Senior scientist Pål Sörgaard, Telenor, Oslo.

Abstract

Designing the new intranet is about exploiting web technology in an organisational context so that the users can better utilise the intranet from a knowledge management perspective. This means to take advantage of the specific features that characterise web technology, to take advantage of the tangible traces of everyday work activities, and to take advantage of the fact that actions on an intranet are not isolated events. The pervading theme in this thesis is how to design the intranet to activate the users rather than a preoccupation with technology per se. The ambition has been to understand why intranets are being under-utilised and to influence the way intranets are understood. Another objective has been to design a new framework for intranet implementations in general and for knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in particular. The research described in this thesis has taken place in an industrial environment and in close collaboration with the members of the organisation under study. The results apply to and are relevant to large and/or geographically disperse organisations, where the members do not know or know of each other and the organisation as a whole does not know what it knows. Further, leveraging the knowledge of the employees becomes increasingly important in the post-industrial society, where organisations depend on networks, co-operation, and openness to achieve a competitive edge. This thesis consists of five papers and a framing introduction. Papers 1, 2, and 3 deal with enacted knowledge and competence, whereas papers 4 and 5 are targeted towards innovation and knowledge creation. The intro-duction places the papers in a context and presents the contributions; (1) the application prototypes, (2) the papers, and (3) the intranet design framework.

Keywords

Intranet, knowledge management, information technology, organisations

Below you can download the content.

Thesis

Introduction

Dick Stenmark
[PDF (124 Kb)]

Paper 1: Leveraging Tacit Organisational Knowledge

Dick Stenmark
Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2001, pp. 9-24.
[PDF (699 Kb)]

Paper 2: Rethinking Competence Systems for Innovative Organisations

Rikard Lindgren, Dick Stenmark, Jan Ljungberg, Magnus Bergquist
Printed in Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on
Information Systems (ECIS), Bled, Slovenia, 2001, pp. 775-786.
[PDF (557 Kb)]

Paper 3: Designing Competence Systems: Towards Interest-activated Technology

Rikard Lindgren, Dick Stenmark
Accepted for publication in Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 2002.
[PDF (846 Kb)]

Paper 4: The Mindpool Hybrid: A New Angle on EBS and Suggestion Systems

Dick Stenmark
Printed in Proceedings of HICSS-35, IEEE Press, Maui, HI., 2001.
[PDF (851 Kb)]

Paper 5: Group Cohesiveness and Extrinsic Motivation in Virtual Groups: Lessons from an Action Case Study of Electronic Brainstorming

Dick Stenmark
The version included in the thesis is the revised paper invited by and submitted to the e-Service Journal special issue on
'e-Groups: Communicating in a Distributed Environment'. A previous version was nominated best paper in the
Distributed Group Support Systems mini-track at HICSS-35, IEEE Press, Hawaii, HI., 2002.
[PDF (699 Kb)]

The whole thesis in one large chunk

[PDF (752 Kb)]