Analyzing Organizational Information Gaps

In this paper, we analyze the relation of private and public information spaces in organizations and its implication for organizational knowledge management. By private information spaces, we mean all (electronic) information, which is only accessible by a single person in an organization (e.g. local files or personal E-Mails). The organizational information space in turn, consists of all electronic information, which can be accessed by all or most members of an organization. Based on this distinction, we develop a notion of information gaps between the organizational and the individual worker’s information space. We derive four basic situations and discuss the implications for organizational knowledge management in each one. We support our claims by describing results from initial evaluation studies.