Mark Gregory

ESC Rennes School of Business, Francemark.gregory@esc-rennes.fr

Dr. Renaud Macgilchrist

ESC Rennes School of Business, Francerenaud.macgilchrist@esc-rennes.fr

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Director of Studies Prof. David Weir, University Campus SuffolkSupervisor Dr. Renaud Macgilchrist ESC Rennes

A Personal Working Model

www.markrogergregory.net

Presentation themes

A model of a Personal Working Model The context of my research: personal

information management systems The motivation, justification and

methodology for my research, including some contributions I hope to make as I answer my research question

Why a Working Model must exist Ways in which to model the Working

Model and its components

A Personal Working Model

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Shopping item

Supplier Quantity

bread hard discount

2 loaves

pasta hard discount

1 kg

basic veg hard discount

enough for 3 days

exotic veg supermarket enough for one meal

chicken farm shop 2.5 kg

Harry Potter DVD

online 2

Table structure

Rows

Columns: header gives

meaning

Personal data: a shopping list

The phenomenon: people keep and use data as they get their work done The phenomenon I am investigating is the

personal knowledge management of individual knowledge workers as they carry out their work

This constitutes a personal work system (Baskerville 2011) in which the primary systemic element is the worker, who interacts with her personal data as it is stored on and made available by means of information and communications technology

Baskerville calls the computer-specific element of this an individual information system

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Personal information management within the personal work system (Paul 2010) defines an information system as ICT

in use In (Gregory 2012) I identify the personal

information management system and suggest that this is substantially the same thing as Baskerville’s IIS

There remain unresolved boundary issues here! Where does the personal work system end and the personal information management system begin?

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What do I mean by a PIMS?

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Category Item When needed

Hours Plan

Hours Done

Research UKAIS 2014 conference paper – revise paper

DONE 16 16

Teaching Set MCQ for IS444E IBIS class Tomorrow 4 1

Personal Get some shopping in Today 1 0

A personal information management system is constituted when someone uses ICT – here a spreadsheet – to store data which subsequently informs decisions or action. The “systemic” element – the knowledge-wielding, learning element of the system – is the person who uses the information. The information is filtered data associated with meaning, here “simple” column headings. But in fact there is nothing simple about this process of attributing meaning. How “meaningful” would this data be if the content and headings were in a natural language you didn’t understand?

My original two-part research question

1. How do knowledge workers manage their personal information and knowledge?

2. How can knowledge workers be helped to improve their personal knowledge management (PKM) by means of a useful and applicable teaching, learning and evaluation framework?

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The law of requisite variety put forward by Ross Ashby can be stated thus:

“Variety absorbs variety, defines the minimum number of states necessary for a controller to control a system of a given number of states” (Ashby 1956)

New insight: Obeying the Laws - 1

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(Conant & Ashby 1970): Good Regulator theorem, “Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system...

The design of a complex regulator includes the making or maintenance of a model of the system to be regulated.

The theorem shows that any regulator that is maximally both successful and simple must be isomorphic with the system being regulated.”

New insight: Obeying the Laws - 2

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Good Regulator Theory: Significance The regulator or control system must be

capable of creating requisite variety Conant and Ashby claimed great generality

for their theory See (Scholten, 2010a), (Scholten, 2010b) for

a primer and an exegesis: “Every Good Key Must Be A Model Of The Lock It Opens”

Major implications for IS theory and practice E.g. we have got to be serious about teaching and

practising modelling; and IS has things to teach hackers! (and much to learn too).

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A revised RQ formulation and how that has changed my research What is the contribution of personal

information management systems PIMS to the Working Model and personal work system of knowledge workers?

Necessary precursor: appropriate modelling mechanisms Ideally a direct regulator which is an active

isomorphic model At least homomorphic

Personal work systems For each knowledge worker (Drucker 1999): We posit the existence of a Personal Work

System PWS that is individual to each person That PWS is supported by a Personal

Information Management System PIMS: (Gregory & Descubes 2011a, b) Broadly the same as Individual Information

Systems IIS supporting personal and work-related Work Systems: (Baskerville 2011)

Very similar to a User Generated Information System UGIS: (DesAutels 2011)

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Knowledge representation: KR We need to model the model… Existing KR techniques vary in their:

Expressiveness Precision Ease of comprehension

The more abstract, the more precise we can be in expression and manipulation (potentially even by machine); but less generally applicable, and more difficult to learn

Knowledge workers cannot really survive only with one KR approach Especially if that is « just » natural language

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Conceprocity: Concept Process Reciprocity Conceprocity – concept ↔ process

reciprocity – is a visual and textual language and toolset intended for capturing, expressing, communicating and co-creating models of topic areas of domain knowledge by domain experts or learners

Semi-formal semantics – human emphasis, used when investigating problem situations; but grammar rules exist and are partially enforced

The first contribution of my PhD

Main symbols

Example KR: a Conceprocity map of planning and doing the shopping

Source: author

Dictionary for “Do the shopping”

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An abductive insight It is a surprising fact that people get things done

despite not having an explicit regulatory model nor an obvious personal information management system

Possible abductive explanation: people must and do have implicit regulators in the form of so-called mental models which are homomorphic (somewhat isomorphic) with the reality

Model-informed & self-managed action & process So what are the models and what PIMS have

they de facto constructed?

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“Reality” and models: discovering the PWS

2020

Assembling tools or creating them:

Data / Presentation /Integration [ / Scripting]

Concept mapData and Information

modelLife and work of individual:

task focus

Personal Information Management System supporting Personal Work

System

Analysed system:conceptual model

Analysis

Synthesis

The work system and the

information system used

by the individual

The Personal Working Model: a conceptual model

of a person’s individual work

system

Methodology and techniques Structured auto-ethnography: telling my

own action-story as I seek to understand and to prototype better techniques

Re-viewing the literature of personal information management PIM by means of fuzzy concept maps (Leximancer), demonstrating the gap – no systems view

Mentored action research with research participants leading to designed concept maps

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Research data analysis: fuzzy concept maps Semi-automatic semantic analysis using

Leximancer This will permit a more objective categorisation

process and may even give rise to emergent personal ontology

Data to be analysed is text: Collected auto-ethnographically by Research

Mentor and Research Partners Collected also from students

An analysis of my PhD journal

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A Model of a Personal Working Model

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The Personal Work System PWS of a knowledge worker

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Components of a personal information management system PIMS

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Research objectives and motivation Objective - To discover by mixed research methods:

How each individual’s Personal (Baskerville 2011) Work System (Alter 1999, 2010) PWS can better be supported by her Personal Information Management System PIMS

How to help people to improve their PIMS and PWS via explicit modelling and implicit learning (by both research volunteer and researcher mentor)

To understand how to “surface” the Working Model Motivation

Desire to be engaged in relevant and even passionate research and related teaching

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Experiment and research methodology Concept mapping approach Current status

Analyse own auto-ethnography using Leximancer emergent or fuzzy concept maps. This involves using Leximancer to enquire into the author’s auto-ethnographic research journal (130000 words). The specific auto-ethnographic approach is based on systematic self-observation (Rodriguez and Ryave, 2002).

Leximancer. We will seed Leximancer with compound concepts (e.g. information system, personal information management, personal information management system) and thus to refine and focus the resultant concept map. An early attempt at this analysis is reproduced as Figure 3

Largely complete.

Building various text corpora and then analysing them

Leximancer; seeking the emergence of significant vocabulary as a fuzzy concept map

Underway.

Recognised writing concerning personal information management

Seeking evidence of a systems approach in the PIM literature; expecting the null hypothesis

 

Key information systems literature Seeking evidence of a systems approach in the IS literature; expecting the hypothesis but at a low level of significance

 

Key literature concerning the epistemology and ontology of personal information management and personal knowledge management

Seeking an emergent vocabulary  

Further research - 1

Further research - 2

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Experiment and research methodology Concept mapping approach Current status

Analyse own auto-ethnography using Conceprocity; the outcome will be a directed and synthetic concept map

Conceprocity; the outcome is expected to be a developed definition of a Working Model

This presentation; forthcoming paper.

Observing the usability and usefulness of Conceprocity mapping used by postgraduate students as a means of understanding and elucidating research articles

Conceprocity. The outcomes expected to be (1) a better understanding of the extent to which these two usage profiles are used and useful to students and probably (2) refinements to the Conceprocity mapping approach

The first experiment is complete; initial analysis indicates a sometimes very poor level of conceptual understanding by the students; however, some produce very well structured maps and simultaneously report considerable satisfaction with the method. In a second experiment, students are being more tightly directed in their use – an instance of mentored action learning. Results will be analysed before the conference.

Existing and developing contributions from my Ph.D. research to date Initial diffusion

Twelve conference papers Website: www.markrogergregory.net, designed to

draw in volunteers Conceprocity’s two dialects

CAPRICE: for students Empirical investigation in S1 2013/4 as MSc students had to

model the concepts and relationships present in an academic paper concerning e-commerce – loose guidance

S2: tight guidance to PGE IS Minor students CAPRILOPE: for practitioners; empirical work with

research volunteers as I and they model their personal work systems Volunteers welcome!

Planned contributions from my Ph.D. Conceptualisation and illustration of the individual

working models of certain individuals, starting with me – see earlier slides. Action research.

Analysis of unschooled and schooled Conceprocity mapping by students: how useful? Action learning.

An insistence on modelling – not an optional extra…

All leading to a synthesised statement of requirements for effective PIM tools and systems - based on action research outcomes Practically relevant teaching, learning, mentoring and

self-evaluation approach Recognise shortcomings in this research and set out

a programme for later research – this was the abduction, now what about other logics of enquiry?

Next steps: five more months to complete my research Intervening minimally (“loose”) and

significantly (“tight”) in concept mapping carried out by students; S1 & S2 2013/4

Intervening by means of mentoring of research volunteers; May to September 2014

Federated by a web-based community of practice, www.teamkim.org (currently under construction; full availability late spring 2014)

Limited further auto-ethnography

Take home messages

Models are necessary; we have a duty to help people understand that

Models exist; we must help to make them more explicit

Control – management – mandates good modelling and requisite variety

Each of us should endeavour to build good regulators – a good Working Model – and to help others to do so

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Presentation references Alter, S., 1999. A general, yet useful theory

of information systems. Communications of the AIS 1, 3.

Alter, S., 2010. Work system concepts as the core for teaching Information Systems and Operations Management. AMCIS 2010 Proceedings 533.

Ashby, W.R., 1956. An introduction to cybernetics. Chapman & Hall London.

Baskerville, R.L., 2011. Individual information systems as a research arena. Eur J Inf Syst 20, 251–254. doi:10.1057/ejis.2011.8

Conant, R.C., Ashby, W.R., 1970. Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. International journal of systems science 1, 89–97.

DesAutels, P., 2011. UGIS: Understanding the nature of user-generated information systems. Business Horizons 54, 185–192.

Drucker, P.F., 1999. Knowledge-worker productivity: The biggest challenge. The knowledge management yearbook 2000–2001.

Gregory, M., 2012. A reflection on Personal Information Management Systems. Presented at the PIM Workshop 2012, part of CHI 2012, Seattle, WA.

Gregory, M., Descubes, I., 2011a. Structured reflection in Information Systems Teaching and Research. Presented at the UKAIS 2011: Proceedings of the 2011 conference of the United Kingdom Academy for Information Systems, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, April 2011, Oxford, England.

Gregory, M., Descubes, I., 2011b. Understanding PIMS: Personal Information Management Systems. Research Journal of Economics, Business and ICT 2011, 31–37.

Paul, R.J., 2010. Motivation for Writing the Paper What an Information System Is, and Why Is It Important to Know This: Why I Give Lectures and Seminars. Journal of Computing and Information Technology 18.

Rodriguez, N., Ryave, A., 2002. Systematic self-observation. Sage Publications, Inc.

Scholten, D.P., 2010a. A Primer For Conant & Ashby’s “Good-Regulator Theorem.” http://www.goodregulatorproject.org/images/

A_Primer_For_Conant_And_Ashby_s_Good-Regulator_Theorem.pdf

Scholten, D.P., 2010b. Every Good Key Must Be A Model Of The Lock It Opens (The Conant & Ashby Theorem Revisited).

Refs: D:\Q\PhD\A Working Model.docx