Posted by Denham on July 08, 1999 at 07:51:14:

In Reply to: Information Management Plan posted by Dianna Roberts on July 08, 1999 at 00:29:17:

Greetings Dianna,

Seems you are asking for two items here:
1) A way to provide easy, personalised, intuitive, integrated, seemless access to your information repository and external sources.
2) Some push or profile matching to match individual needs.

An information or knowledge audit would certainly help you to locate the different types of information available, catalog where they reside, determine the most effective way to access them and provide information on the security required. Without any information on your architecture or which repositories you have, I would say you need to look at an enterprise directory tool here. There are a number of 'profiling' tools which can help you build a picture of user needs by monitoring their system interactions (Beehive from Abuzz, Autonomy's Active Knowledge) there are push applications where you set the parameters (GrapeVine).

If you question is more around how to determine user information needs, you may wish to look at the library articles on 'information interviews'. Here you will need to be sensitive to relevance, timeliness, delivery medium, core and periphery interests, frequency and volume issues and nature of the requirement (review, overview or detailed). I find it best to place people in contact with people rather than people in contact with content, as others in the field act as a valuable filter and can help to point you to the most worthwhile sources. A big issue here is maintaining the users interest profile and supplying sufficient useful peripheral information to enable strategic learning and to supply quality market intelligence. One way that has worked for a number of my clients is to have information gathering as one of the prime functions of their communities of practice. This way you get to share the search burden and have the added benefit of a group filter and recommendations.

Please come back with any further questions.

• Who knows what?

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