This paper reports fieldwork from the electrical utilities industry, examining the suitability of current knowledge management perspectives to the day-to-day work of mobile staff. Reporting the results of the empirical study, we make a distinction between four aspects of local and mobile "knowledge management" as it took place in the mobile work setting: sharing, i.e., several parties exchange knowledge; indexing, i.e., one party explains to another what knowledge to retrieve; diagnosing, i.e., two parties make sense of how to interpret a situation, and; foreseeing, i.e., one party (or more) uses knowledge to project the future. We compare and contrast the empirical findings with current knowledge management perspectives, and outline an initial sketch of a framework for "practical knowledge management."

Designing concepts for new mobile services and devices, poses several challenges to the design. We consider user participation as a way to address part of the challenges. We show how our effort relates to current and past research. In particular, PD (Participatory Design) has inspired us in developing two participatory techniques. The two techniques are organized around situations either staged or real where users and designers can envision and enact future scenarios: a role-playing game with toys, and SPES (Situated and Participative Enactment of Scenarios). They were developed in an industry-funded project that investigates services for the nomadic Internet user of the future. We then discuss how the techniques help in facing the design challenges.

this paper, we report and elaborate on the results of a field study in a pharmaceutical research organization. The objective of the study was to facilitate the design of mechanisms that help users of CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) technologies to be accessible constantly without running the risk of inappropriate interaction. Currently, this is not possible, and people experience problems accordingly. Let us start with considering this problem in some more detail.

NewsMate is a knowledge management system supporting distributed and mobile teams of journalists. The system addresses well-known problems of knowledge management systems by: (1) shifting focus from problems to task; (2) incorporating pointers to several sources, even external to the organisation; (3) supporting direct communication between people by articulating local conditions. This paper reports the system and the preliminary results of use experiences. Keywords: Mobile CSCW, Knowledge management, Organisational memory, Expertise management, News production 1. Introduction In this paper we offer a complementary approach to information technology (IT) support for knowledge management (KM) that is illustrated with the NewsMate prototype, a mobile KM system designed for radio journalists. Journalists repackage information to make understandable and interesting reports. In radio journalism the tempo is usually high and little time is available for preparations. Reporting is also ofte...

We report on a study of radio journalists conducting meetings, deciding which events to investigate and the extent to which they qualify as news, and, crucially, the practical efforts involved in conducting the interviews and editing the raw recordings into a finished programme. Examining this particular strand of work, it became obvious that in many instances, finding out which questions to ask is much more important than sharing knowledge. Establishing which events may qualify as news is a collective effort, and is currently accomplished in co-located meetings. Since “new news” takes place at an increasing pace, however, there is now very often a need to establish “newsworthiness” in the field, where journalists are intractably mobile and detached from the editorial collective at their radio station. Thus, this paper points to some design implications for mobile knowledge management.

this paper is based on a field study of radio journalists (see Fagrell et al (1999b) for details). In the following section we will summarise some of the findings.

Antall sider/No of pages: 18 Norsk Regnesentral/Norwegian Computing Center

. This experience paper describes a project implementing a pilot application for highly mobile ships' surveyors. It demonstrates the usefulness of seamless integration between various platforms. It is a common problem in today 's mobile computing that the content as well as presentation tiers of applications may have to be replicated across platforms. This paper introduces the MOPAS system, in which a layered architecture of dedicated markuplanguages and translation engines facilitate seamless integration between HTTP- and WAP-based media. The surveyors, whose work comprised the main source of inspiration for its design, favorably evaluated the system. Future work aims to generalize the MOPAS architecture to cover other media, such as Windows CE over Wireless LAN as well as a wider range of applications for mobile fieldworkers. Introduction The possibilities and requirements within the area of personal and business communication are evolving at an unprecedented pace. Some...

NewsMate is a knowledge management system supporting distributed and mobile teams of journalists. The system addresses well-known problems of knowledge management systems by: (1) shifting focus from problems to task; (2) incorporating pointers to several sources, even external to the organisation; (3) supporting direct communication between people by articulating local conditions. This paper reports the system and the preliminary results of use experiences. Keywords Mobile CSCW, Knowledge management, Organisational memory, Expertise management, News production INTRODUCTION In this paper we offer a complementary approach to information technology (IT) support for knowledge management (KM) that emphasise on providing context rather than taking it away. This is illustrated with the NewsMate, a mobile KM system designed for radio journalists. Journalists repackage information to make understandable and interesting reports. In radio journalism the tempo is usually high and little time ...

The paper reports from a study at a local Swedish radio station informing the design of new IT support. We suggest a prototype application -- the NewsMate -- with the aim of supporting knowledge sharing and expertise location among the journalists in both office and field situations. The guiding design principles for the NewsMate are evaluated against existing systems and approaches.