From Personal Information Management Towards Collaborative Information Management in Enterprises - Analysis, Solution Concept and Description of a Prototype

Enterprises as well as employees struggle to encounter solutions to efficiently handle increasing amounts of electronic information. Most information management systems today are based upon top-down, mainly technical approaches and impose their own structures and procedures. This often results in an even greater confusion as complexity grows and integration with existing systems is difficult. Therefore, in this work, a bottom-up conceptual approach centering on users’ needs is developed. It will be shown that enabling users to better – i.e. more flexibly – organize their personal information objects1 consequently leads to a benefit on enterprise level. The international diagnostics company Roche Diagnostics is taken as a representative showcase to analyze the challenges on the way towards efficient information handling and to design a prototype responding to these challenges. Published in: OSSWALD, Achim; STEMPFHUBER, Maximilian; WOLFF, Christian (eds.) (2007). Open Innovation. Proc. 10th International Symposium for Information Science. Constance: UVK, 171-187. 1 Personal information objects are e. g. emails, documents, bookmarks, contacts, calendar entries, tasks etc. needed to perform a specific task. The term will be used consequently in this paper to refer mainly to the first three.