Human-system interaction and trend map

Hello everyone and welcome back to KBD's blog! It’s been over a week since the last post, but we wanted to have our kick-start meeting with our contact before to publish this week’s post! This post will consist of brief thinking on how to utilize ISO standards in our project and presentation of our trend map in the field of knowledge management! At the end you will learn more about our contributions in this project. 

Standards and ISO 9241-210:2019

Standards are documents, that enables consistent procedures for repetitive operations. The main purpose of standards is to support business continuity by improving operations, economy, and safety. (SFS 2019) ISO 9241 standards are covering ergonomics of human-computer interactions. ISO 9241-210:2019 Ergonomics of human-system interaction is made to ensure human-centered design in software development. Human-centered design is an approach to interactive systems development, which goals are to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors and usability knowledge as well as techniques (Suomen Standardisoimisliitto 2019). 

Our team assignment differs a bit from a software development project, because our main focus is to boost knowledge in software development projects in our target organization. We are not going to create a new software or technological solution primarily, but we will use human-centered design as our guideline in this project. That is how we are going to use the ISO 9241-210:2019 standard, it is going to be our guide when planning human-centered design project. 

At this point of our project, it’s hard to recognize what other ISO standards we can use in our assignment. However, we have checked out a few standards, and when boosting knowledge sharing in software projects, where the employees use digital communication equipment, we could use the standard, ISO 9241-125:2017 Guidance on visual presentation of information, to help sharing information in the communication channel better. 

Knowledge management and trend map

In the workshop of this course, we were talking about the top software trends in 2021 which were for example mixed reality (MR), blockchain, low-code development and outsourcing (DevTeam.Space 2021). Due to our topic, we looked some technology-based knowledge management (KM) trends that could help us to find useful proposals for our target organization.  

Knowledge management is a tool or processes to share, access and otherwise manage information and knowledge within an organization (Eisenhauer 2020). The difference between information and knowledge is that the information can contain documents, procedures or e.g. analyzed data from sales. Knowledge on the other hand is what you have learned from the information, and it can be separated to tacit and explicit knowledge, as we presented in the last post. The nature of knowledge makes it hard to share properly sometimes, and those are moments where we try to find solutions. 

Without further parley, let’s deep into KM trends. We visualize these trends with a trend map, where we have gathered the trends that can be supported with technology but also without it. We gathered the map from different sources (Chug 2020; Eisenhauer 2020), and we consciously left the software development trends out of it, so it is just based on KM trends. We left the software design trends out of it, because our task is to boost knowledge sharing in project-based business. As you can see from the map, most of the KM trends are technology-related, and human-centered design has a huge role in their success. For example, friendlier user interfaces in KM tools, strong search engines and seamless collaboration tools are all dependent on fluent human computer interaction. 

So, in the technological part of the map, the trends dependents on the ease of use of technology and also the ease of access. The strong search engine means, that the KM tool should have a good way on finding what you are looking for. Only non-technological trend that we selected to our map is that knowledge sharing should be more transparency, meaning that for example employees should be able to find the frequently asked questions from the key issues. In the middle of the map you can see the trends that can be related to technology but what can also be independent of technology. Social interaction, seamless collaboration tools and processes and more interactive KM are trends that emphasizes the importance of human in knowledge sharing. 

This was the first dive into the KM trends, and as a team we pondered, that we are trying to find couple of different proposals regarding different trends to our target organization both technological and non-technological. We think that this dive into KM trends and creating this trend map was eye-opening and fine way to start this brainstorming together. 

Team contributions

In the last post we presented our team goals that are pretty high, and to achieve our goals, we will work together really closely. To our delight we noticed that out contact from the target organization wants to work closely with us too, and that will boost knowledge sharing in this project. Our contributions will get clearer during our journey, but at this point we have agreed that Eveliina will be the one who contacts our target organization. In addition, we have agreed that for weekly blog update we will pick someone to take responsibility for its publication even though we create the content together. Also, to ease our teamwork, we have agreed weekly meetings for the entire project. 

Thank you for keeping up with us! Again, until next time!

-KBD

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Based on the feedback we got from the blog phase 1, we added some notes about relevant standards in our last blog post. Also, about the technology trends, we added own post called "Future technology focused possibilities considering our solution".

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References in this post:

Chug, P. (2020). The Future of Knowledge Management: Trends for 2021. Poonam Chug. 26.11.2020. Available (accessed 5.2.2021): https://poonam-chug.medium.com/the-future-of-knowledge-management-trends-for-2021-cc4b3864edc.

DevTeam.Space. (2021). 10 Trends In Software Development 2021. DevTeam.Space, Blog. Available (accessed 5.2.2021): https://www.devteam.space/blog/10-trends-in-software-development/.

Eisenhauer, T. (2020). 17 Hot Knowledge Management Trends for 2021. Axero Solutions, Blog. Available (accessed 5.2.2021): https://axerosolutions.com/blogs/timeisenhauer/pulse/344/17-hot-knowledge-management-trends-for-2021.

SFS (2019). Avain standardien maailmaan. SFS-käsikirja 1. SFS 2019/08.

Suomen Standardisoimisliitto, (2019). Ergonomics of human-system interaction. Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems. SFS/ICS ISO 9241-210.