Customer Reviews

Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)

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This book has three separate sections, and though the sections are related they differ in style and approach. The first section, which can be attributed to Professor Choo, pretty much contains the same stuff as in his book "The Knowing Organisation", but condensed and more to the point. If you haven't read TKO there's no need to buy it after having read section one in this book. If you have read TKO, well, section one summarises and explains it to you. Theoretical frameworks regarding information needs, information seeking and information use is covered in Chapter 1, while Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between data, information, and knowledge. Choo also advocated his own typology of organisational knowledge: tacit, explicit, and cultural knowledge. Taken together, section one forms a theoretical foundation for knowledge work, but since not much of it is visible in the rest of the book it is kind of a stand-alone framework.

Section two, which can be traced to the work of Detlor, deals with intranets as a platform for knowledge work (Chapter 3) and discusses how intranets can be designed to support such work (Chapter 4). In my opinion, this is the real contribution of the book. The author(s?) does a good job bringing together lessons from different academic fields and offers many interesting references to related work. Section 2 is thus a gold mine for graduate and PhD students engaged in research efforts. The conclusions are however on a meta level and perhaps a bit difficult for the average business person to apply and appreciate.

Section three, finally, seems to be the result of Turnbull's work examining how people use the Web to find information. Continuing in an academic style, Chapter 5 first guides us through the use of various statistical methods for literature analysis and then presents a number of browsing strategies found in the literature. In Chapter 6, some hands-on results are finally presented in form of bar charts, correlation tables, and other graphics. Although I find this section less interesting, it is the one with the most practical lessons and results and may thus be appreciated by practitioners.
Still, the book is interesting and a worthwhile reading to all academics and ambitious practitioners and had it not been for the outrageous price I would highly recommend it. However, [money]is way too much and approximately 3 to 4 times higher than I would normally pay, especially so when much of the content is available elsewhere (other books, conference proceedings, and journals).

Enterprise integration is a must today and this can be achieved by combining infostructure and infrastructure resources. Choo's prescription here provides a framework for assessment of knowledge management using best business practices in Web-based environments. It, also, facilitates furthering knowledge management studies in relation to return on investment in a corporate culture. To achieve this end a direct route is prescribed in this book. It has to be based on the integration of organizational knowledge, i.e. using Choo's favorite trio: tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge and cultural knowledge.