Knowledge has widely been acknowledged as one of the most important factors for corporate competitiveness, and we have witnessed an explosion of IS/IT solutions claiming to provide support for knowledge management (KM). A relevant question to ask, though, is how systems and technology intended for information such as the intranet can be able to assist in the managing of knowledge. To understand this, we must examine the relationship between information and knowledge. Building on Polanyi's theories, I argue that all knowledge is tacit, and what can be articulated and made tangible outside the human mind is merely information. However, information and knowledge affect one another. By adopting a multi-perspective of the intranet where information, awareness, and communication are all considered, this interaction can best be supported and the intranet can become a useful and people-inclusive KM environment.

When studying how ordinary Web users interact with Web search engines, researchers tend to either treat the users as a homogeneous group or group them according to search experience. Neither approach is sufficient, we argue, to capture the variety in behavior that is known to exist among searchers. By applying automatic clustering technique based on self-organizing maps to search engine log files from a corporate intranet, we show that users can be usefully separated into distinguishable segments based on their actual search behavior. Based on these segments, future tools for information seeking and retrieval can be targeted to specific segments rather than just made to fit the "the average user." The exact number of clusters, and to some extent their characteristics, can be expected to vary between intranets, but our results indicate that some more generic groups may exist. In our study, a large group of users appeared to be "fact seekers" who would benefit from higher precision, a smaller group of users were more holistically oriented and would likely benefit from higher recall, and a third category of users seemed to constitute the knowledgeable users. These three groups may raise different design implications for search-tool developers.

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In today's highly dynamic business environment, organizational creativity is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage. Although the unpredictability of creativity makes it difficult to plan for, it may still be possible to facilitate knowledge creation given that we understand what affects it. In this paper, seven enabling factors of organizational creativity are identified and discussed. These factors are then compared to the specific characteristics of intranet technology in order to find out when and how this environment may stimulate creativity. The conclusion is that intranets are most likely to contribute by providing a variety of information in dynamic and unpredictable environments. However, standard management literature instead unanimously prescribes organizational convergence as the default strategy for the modern manager. Our analysis suggests that this control approach not only conflicts with some of the creativity-enabling factors but also clashes with the fundamental principles underpinning the web. The organizational implication of the conclusion presented in this paper is that only in organizations where management has embraced an updated attitude towards information management, can the corporate intranet truly contribute to knowledge creation and creativity.

Much research argues that information technology can have a positive influence on knowledge application. However, practical results from research on knowledge management systems indicate that such systems often fail when implemented in contemporary organizations. Whilst maintenance of knowledge management systems has been recognized as an important research area, imbalance between additional workload and accurate content still appears to be a critical factor, resulting in systems of little use for organisations in their knowledge application processes. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how knowledge management systems can be designed to better support knowledge application in organizational knowledge work processes. Building on lessons learned from three knowledge management systems, this paper contributes general design principles describing how knowledge management systems can be integrated with everyday work to leverage user practices.