Recent research has shown that financial advisory encounters can successfully be supported with IT-artifacts. Tabletop scenarios, for example, can increase the transparency of the advisory process for customers. However, we have also had the experience that the relationship quality as experienced by customers can suffer severely when IT-artifacts are introduced. Based on these experiences, we developed guidelines for both, the artifact-design itself as well as for the environment in order to avoid this effect, and implemented them in one of our prototypes. The evaluation reveals that these measures proved to be effective. With the reported study, we seek to enhance our design knowledge of IT-supported advisory scenarios with a special focus on relationship building. In a larger context, we argue that the use of IT during sensitive face-to-face encounters will be of growing significance in the future but, as yet, is hardly understood. We make a contribution in this area with our generic requirements, design principles and evaluation. ABSTRACTRecent research has shown that financial advisory encounters can successfully be supported with IT-artifacts. Tabletop scenarios, for example, can increase the transparency of the advisory process for customers. However, we have also had the experience that the relationship quality as experienced by customers can suffer severely when IT-artifacts are introduced. Based on these experiences, we developed guidelines for both, the artifactdesign itself as well as for the environment in order to avoid this effect, and implemented them in one of our prototypes. The evaluation reveals that these measures proved to be effective. With the reported study, we seek to enhance our design knowledge of IT-supported advisory scenarios with a special focus on relationship building. In a larger context, we argue that the use of IT during sensitive face-to-face encounters will be of growing significance in the future but, as yet, is hardly understood. We make a contribution in this area with our generic requirements, design principles and evaluation.

Abstract. In order to enable knowledge sharing and reuse among software entities, artificial intelligence researchers have proposed to develop 'ontologies' as the explicit formal specifications of conceptualizations. These ontologies were normally designed by knowledge engineers who laid down the basic categories and relations for a certain domain. However, in any practical setting there will be conflicting interests which pertain to different conceptualizations of which a knowledge engineer will usually not be aware of. For this reason, we propose a three-phased ontology construction procedure in which the knowledge engineer mediates between the differing conceptions experts or users may hold about a knowledge domain. This procedure is described in detail in this paper and subsequently empirically demonstrated and evaluated in a study with 28 participants. The evaluation reveals convincing advantages of the proposed knowledge mediation procedure. We conclude that an ontology construction process is not only an engineering task but more importantly also a social process where the relevant parties for example of a work place need to be involved before successful and durable solutions can be found.

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While social and economic aspects of online communities have been investigated broadly, the information exchanged has seldom been the subject of study. The article follows recent work on using an information systems metaphor for online communities: users specify queries and receive information from the online community members. In order to justify this metaphor, information needs to be at least up to classic information products. In this paper we present a framework for the evaluation of timeliness in online communities. An empirical study is presented which compares aspects of timeliness, namely up-to-dateness, for a wiki community and a printed guidebook. Results show that the community is at least as up-to-date as the printed guidebook. While further research is needed, results indicate that online communities can be used as information systems with reasonable information quality values.

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