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5.3 Knowledge Management, Intelligent Systems, and Robots 153

ment management. For more on KM-enabling technologies discuss their issue in forums or blogs), or on public social
and how they can be applied to business unit initiatives, see networks such as Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com),
kmworld.com and knowledgestorm.com. that have a “search answers” feature. Similarly, companies
may ask for advice on how to solve problems or exploit an
opportunity and offer incentives to participate. Answers may
KM and Social Networks generate hundreds of useful ideas within a few days. This is
a kind of brainstorming. Companies also use crowdsourcing
A major place of knowledge creation is in online communi- to solicit advice (see Chapter 8).
ties, including social networks. This is done by crowdsourc-
ing and customer and employee discussions and feedback. Answers Provided by People on Social Networks
This area has several variations. One variety is limited within or Portals
a single company (see the Knowledge Network in the
Caterpillar Online File W5.3). Knowledge can also be cre- Several social networks (e.g., linkedin.com), or Internet por-
ated by user-generated content (see Chapter 7) and in the tals (e.g., answers.yahoo.com) offer free or “for fee” Q&A
“answer” function of some social networks. capabilities.
Web 2.0 applications help aggregate corporate knowl-
edge, facilitate communication and collaboration, and sim- Example: Yahoo! Answers
plify the building of repositories of best practices, as Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com) allows you to post a
demonstrated by the following example. question, for free.
One of the authors of this book posted the following ques-
Example: IBM Jam Events tion on Yahoo! Answers.
Since 2001, IBM has been using communities for online Question: “My Yahoo! e-mail has been hijacked. The
brainstorming sessions, idea generation, and problem-solv- spammer sends requests for money in my name to all the
ing. These sessions are called “Jam Events.” According to people on my contact list. What should I do?” Answer
their Web page, “IBM’s Jams and other Web 2.0 collabora- (Anonymous): (Best answer-chosen by voters): “The spam-
tive mediums are opening up tremendous possibilities for mer could have obtained your password with phishing spam.
collaborative innovation…” (collaborationjam.com). Each Change your password. While you are in your account set-
Jam has a different topic. For example, a large IBM online tings, check for tampering with your alternate e-mail contact
brainstorming session held, called the Innovation Jam, address. That could be used to obtain new passwords. Also,
brought a community of over 150,000 employees from 104 abstain from clicking on links within your spam. That spam-
countries and 67 companies to launch new IBM businesses mer’s webpage can run a malicious script. This runs within
(see collaborationjam.com). your browser and can tell webmail currently logged in within
Virtual meetings where IBM employees can participate in that browser to send spam.”
Innovation Jam launches were conducted in Second Life The answers provided by Yahoo! are usually generated
(SL). IBM’s former CEO even created an avatar to represent manually by volunteers for free. Sometimes the answers are
himself. Besides business, recent topics that have been generated automatically, as described in the next section.
explored by IBM Jams include social issues. See collabora-
tionjam.com/IBMJam. Other topics that have been explored Automated Question–Answer Systems
are new technologies for water filtration, 3-D Internet, and
branchless banking. For the history of IBM Jams, see col- In addition to advice provided by humans, an increasing num-
laborationjam.com/IBMJam. ber of applications attempt to provide automated answers to
users’ questions. The expert finding system described in the
following section is an example of such a system. The user
Finding Expertise and/or Experts Electronically asks a question and the computer tries to find an answer that
and the Use of Expert Location Systems best matches the question. The goal of an automated ques-
tion–answer (Q&A) system is to find answers that match
Expert advice can be provided within an organization in a questions asked in a natural language (e.g., English, Chinese).
variety of ways. Human expertise is rare; therefore, compa-
nies attempt to preserve it electronically, as expert systems, Example: Search Engine Advice
in corporate knowledge bases. Users may look for human Answers.com and Ask.com belong to a special category of
experts to answer their questions or they may search the search engines containing a massive collection of questions,
knowledge bases for expertise. each with pre- generated answers. A computer intelligent
People who need help may post their inquiries internally engine tries to match a question asked in a natural language
on corporate intranets (e.g., using special Q&A platforms, or with a standard question within its matched answer.