The communication space enables the organisational

The communication space enables the organisational members to collectively interpret the
available information by supporting various channels for conversations and negotiations.
Schön (1983) claims that new understanding comes from reflection, and I suggest that the
intranet promotes reflection by making salient different interpretations and viewpoints.
Awareness
space
Information
space
Collaboration
space
Communication
space
Reflection can benefit greatly from being done in dialogue, but dialogue means articulating

and making tacit understanding explicit. Such a process is difficult and the resulting
information is, as discussed earlier, never complete. However, the descriptions are useful as
tools for reflection. For example, Kidd (1994) describes the notes made by knowledge
workers as a type of scaffolding used while in the process of informing themselves.
The awareness space exploits not only explicit links but also tacitly expressed connections
to hook up organisational members with information and people they might otherwise have
missed. By making users aware of peers who not only share an official job description but
also de facto have accessed the same information or authored similar documents, the
awareness space increases the likelihood for community building, communication, and
collaboration.
The collaboration space, finally, provides means for organisational members to
actually participate in collaborative work by offering workflows, shared project areas, and
coordinating routines. When engaged in collaborative work with peers that share your objectives
and understand your vocabulary, the common context necessary for knowledge sharing exists.
In this environment, we can act upon our new understanding, thereby transforming our
knowledge to organisational benefit. The role of IT must therefore be to enable people to
actively work together based on the information available to them, and facilitate the
documentation of their experiences. To achieve this, the spaces for information,
communication, awareness, and collaboration must not be separated from each ot her but
joined in an overlapping and holistic whole. Hence, to summarise this paper, I conclude that:
· We need information, created out of knowledge, to be used as a catalyst for new
thoughts. The role of IT is to provide access to a rich discourse of information.
· We should reflect upon the information at hand. Therefore, we need IT tools that help us
interpret the meaning and discuss the implications of the information.

· We can increase our awareness of other relevant activities by letting IT tools exploit work
patterns to detect and display peers with related interests.
· We must act based upon our new state of knowledge, and IT should thus facilitate both
structured and ad hoc cross-organisational collaboration and co-operation.
References
3
Journal of Knowledge Management Practice, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2007
Understanding Data, Information, Knowledge And Their Inter-Relationships
Anthony Liew, Walden University