Managing Unstructured Information and Knowledge Flow in Knowledge Work Team

Knowledge team work is dynamic and involves the collection, acquisition and dissimilation of unstructured information from multiple parties and sources. Traditional reliance on rigid organization processes (such as database and expertise directory) to locate the knowledge source may not sufficient to respond to the knowledge needs of dynamic work team. This is especially true for work team which is across organizations and involves multi-parties and knowledge sources. A Multi-faceted and Autonomous Knowledge Elicitation System (MAKES) is proposed to integrate the processes of collecting data, classifying them in dynamic taxonomy, navigating unstructured information and modeling knowledge flow from social networks. An example of implementing MAKES in an emergency management system is reported. The problems encountered in emergency management covers a broad area of expertise and a massive amount of data. The agility and responsiveness of the system depends on the effective extraction of the human capital (expertise available), relational capital (social network) embedded in the knowledge work team in the building of its structural capital (system capability) required for problem solving and decision making in emergency management.