Empirical Evaluations of Organizational Memory Information Systems: A Literature Overview

Assessing a considerable lack of systematic empirical evaluation in the field of Knowlegde Management, we give an overview of evaluative approaches in different research areas up to now. We are especially covering those areas which are relevant for the development of Organizational Memories Informations Systems (OMIS): Knowledge Engineering (including Knowledge Acquisition and Ontologies), Human Computer Interaction, Information Retrieval and Software Engineering. We report about (experimental) studies and general guidelines for evaluation from the different research fields. Finally, we show implications for the evaluation of OMIS, propose rules of thumb for the realization of a systematic evaluative study and sketch first ideas for the evaluation of FRODO.