Information Research Weblog

Hello Rishi,

Not surprisingly, the km hype is causing you problems :-) You don't have a km problem that requires 'stakeholder' (whatever they are, 'people', perhaps, 'colleagues' even) interviews, you simply need to sort out a filing structure - a classification scheme (trendily known these days as 'ontologies' - for no reason other than fad). You have an information management problem, not a 'knowledge sharing' problem. Nobody shares 'knowledge' through a set of files - they file documents and retrieve them. The trick is to have a generally agreed structure of document folders that reflects the structure of the organization and the problems, projects, etc., with which the organization deals. You need a document management system - there's a freeware one called QDocs that you could experiment with - it seems to rely on searching rather than filing, but there are others that try to ensure that you have a robust filing system.

Rather than interviewing users before you begin, my approach would be to prototype a solution, using a DM system and then let a sample of users (interested ones, of course) use the system while you watch and ask questions about what they are doing - what they are looking for, how they would prefer to file things, whether they would prefer search over structure, and so on. Revise the system and repeat a couple of times and at the end of that you should have something usable.

Forget Robertson, forget km and just sort out the files :-)