Back in 2010 we asked for participation in an online questionnaire that tried to find out the existence of distinguishable roles of knowledge workers and the particular knowledge actions they perform. Today — after a long to-ing and fro-ing with the publisher — the results of the study have been published in the Journal of Knowledge and Process Management operated by Wiley as Knowledge Worker Roles and Actions — Results of Two Empirical Studies.

This paper proposes a typology of knowledge workers and their respective knowledge actions. The extant literature on the definition of knowledge work actions is examined and evaluated. The existing classifications of roles of knowledge workers are evaluated and extended with additional literature and empirical findings on the definition of a typology of knowledge worker roles. The empirical data in this paper comes from two studies. In the Task Execution Study 20, a knowledge worker had to carry out a selection of prepared tasks. The computer system that the participants were using was equipped with sensors, so that the execution steps of the tasks could be traced and analyzed. The data from the second study comes from a questionnaire survey of knowledge workers, which yielded 43 responses. The paper shows that the sampled users take on all identified knowledge worker roles, and that the knowledge work actions can be recognized in the sensor data from the first study. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a new way of classifying the roles of knowledge workers and the knowledge actions they perform during their daily work. Furthermore, the paper provides a preliminary understanding of the relation between knowledge-intense work tasks, the roles they are executed in, and the tools that are used to accomplish the respective tasks.

In the paper we present 10 roles of knowledge workers and 13 knowledge actions. The knowledge worker roles are:

1. Controller,
2. Helper,
3. Learner,
4. Linker,
5. Networker,
6. Organizer,
7. Retriever,
8. Sharer,
9. Solver, and
10. Tracker

The identified knowledge actions are

1. Acquisition,
2. Analyze,
3. Authoring,
4. Co-authoring,
5. Information search
6. Dissemination,
7. Expert search,
8. Feedback,
9. Formal & Informal Learning,
10. Information organization,
11. Monitoring,
12. Networking and
13. Service search

I hope you find the results presented in the article relevant for your own research. If you are not able to access the article due to paywall restrictions please let me know.

Together with my colleague Benedikt Schmidt from TU Darmstadt I am conducting the Knowledge Worker Roles Study in the context of my Ph.D. studies.

In the focus of the study are knowledge workers, the multiple roles they take on during their regular work and the actions they perform during accomplishing their work. A knowledge worker is anyone who develops or uses knowledge in his or her daily working tasks. Furthermore we try to associate application types with the knowledge actions.

We would like to ask you for your participation in the study which will take approximately 25 minutes. Your participation is anonymous and all answers will be treated confidentially.

You can access the survey at http://bit.ly/KWRStudy

Please feel free to forward the link to the survey to your colleagues, retweet or blog about this call for participation.I count on the power of my social network…

We will keep you updated about the results of the study.

Image via Wikipedia

Thanks to a tweet by George Siemens I came across Tim Kastelle’s Blog today. Besides a general recommendation forhis blog, I’d like to point out some posts explicitly that where very inspiring. The post Networks and the Information Glut discusses how “new” the phenomena of information overload really is:

Or think about Charles Darwin – over the course of scientific career he sent over 15,000 letters. It’s safe to assume that he received just as many. Think about how much time he would have spent reading & writing letters, and how much new information and ideas would have been included in that – it’s probably more than we’re spending writing our blogs, updating our statuses and twittering.

Furthermore he links to an interesting video that show the social network of 18th century scientists such as Voltaire (by Dan Edelstein)

Another post discusses the common prejudice that new media leeds to being less smart people and invoke Plato‘s argument that writing down things would result in making us stupid. Tim shows all the false assumptions and even calls Plato’s arguments dumb. Great one. Give him a read…

I recently presented my paper “Communication is the key. Support Durable Knowledge Sharing in Software Engineering by Microblogging” at the SENSE 2009 workshop in Kaiserslautern.

Abstract:

Communication is undoubtedly one of the key elements of successful software development. Especially in larger groups communication is the critical point in gathering and forming relevant information, share knowledge and create functioning products. Some studies stressed out the fact that informal, ad hoc communication take up a significant part of the developers working time. Nonetheless the support of inter-project and inter-organisational communication seems to play a minor part in the development of IDEs and software development platforms. In this paper we discuss communication and knowledge sharing in software engineering and introduce an approach to support social software engineering by microblogging. This approach is to be studied in future projects.

Here you will find the draft version of the paper.