Knowledge management technology: examination of information diverse repositories
This paper reports results of an empirical examination of the contribution of information diverse repositories in enhancing individual knowledge and performance in a judgemental decision making context. A laboratory experiment was conducted using 32 graduate students as voluntary subjects. Performance of actual subjects was compared with that of their nominal naive and optimal counterparts. Results indicate that actual subjects performed better than naive, but worse than optimal nominals irrespective of the level of information diversity present in their available repositories. the results also indicate that subjects tended to perform significantly worse when faced with more diverse information. It can be concluded from the results that, in general, knowledge workers may have difficulties in turning available task information into knowledge and translating it to task performance. This also suggests that such workers may potentially benefit from a number of other knowledge management initiatives that would enhance their understanding of the existence and the form of relationships among diverse information.