Towards a System Support of Collaborative Knowledge Work

Abstract

Knowledge work is becoming the predominant type of work in developed countries. Leveraging their expertise, skills, and experiences, knowledge workers daily deal with demanding situations. Therefore, they widely work autonomously, but usually collaborate in multiple contexts. Further, their work is influenced by dynamic factors like time constraints, costs, and available resources, and thereby it cannot be pre-specfied like routine work. The lack of an appropriate context and process support, in turn, reduces their productivity and hinders the reuse as well as the continuous improvement of elaborated solutions. This paper structures collaborative knowledge work and presents its characteristics and dimensions. Moreover, we introduce a lifecycle methodology to support collaborative knowledge workers holistically.