Understanding Consultants' Information-seeking Practices: Knowledge management's touchpoint

摘要

This note reports on preliminary findings from a study of consultants' information-seeking practices in a global IT services company. We conducted semi-structured interviews with consultants in addition to observing their interactions with a knowledge repository in the course of everyday problem-solving events. Initial analyses suggest that consultants interacted with the knowledge repository with very instrumental ends in mind, looking for information that resembled more tidbits than knowledge. Time was also an important constraint-search was rarely approached without a perceived time cost. Though deeper analysis is pending, our data points to broader implications for the design of knowledge repositories, designers' and scholars' conceptualizations of them, and subsequently, approaches to studying them. We end with a discussion of next steps toward developing this work more fully.