4 Cooper, Nash, Phan, and Bailey
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functional teams serve to bridge thought worlds by creating a shared vision of a
successful, marketable product, there are few resources (e.g., mission statements) that
are effective at providing the same sort of actionable focus for the organization as a
whole.
Thought world-related problems, such as conflict and miscommunication, can be
mitigated by helping people to learn about other domains and to recognize and exploit
differences (Dougherty, 1992). Knowledge management systems (KMS) have the poten-
tial to support this type of learning. Knowledge-based approaches have been used to
support transfer of best practices (Markus, 2001), knowledge reuse for innovation
(Majchrzak, Cooper, & Neece, 2004), identifying experts, and a variety of business
processes (Davenport, Jarvenpaa, & Beers, 1996).
Therefore, JPL 101 was envisioned as an educational resource for Laboratory
personnel, and a way to assist them in exploring the abundance of electronic and other
resources available to them. The orienting question that guided development was “How
do you help people to make sense of the ‘big picture’ given that direct work-related
exposure may be minimal (or nonexistent)?”
CASE DESCRIPTION
This case describes the 11-month evolution of JPL 101 from initial concept to fully
operational system. There were three distinct stages: (1) beta test of initial concept, (2)
feasibility analysis for use as a contest, and (3) implementation. Each of these phases
is addressed in the following sections.
Beta Test
The goal of the beta test phase was to quickly assess whether it was worth pursuing
implementation. Due to the structure of the KM project, there was flexibility to explore
interesting concepts, but implementation required explicit approval and sponsorship by
the KM project. From the very beginning, JPL 101 was conceived of as a quiz. The name
was chosen as a tongue-in-cheek reference to beginners’ classes in college to emphasize
the educational nature of the resource, and to convey that much of the content is basic
material that employees should know. The quiz metaphor seemed like a natural approach
in an organization that values education as highly as JPL does.
The beta test version consisted of a paper prototype. Over the course of one week,
the team brainstormed questions; experimented with different formats, difficulty, and
wording of questions; and had much fun creating wrong answers. The resulting 81
questions were divided into three roughly equal groups. Participants were given the
three sets of questions in different orders to make sure that all the test questions would
have at least a subset of the group looking at them. Timed tests were then conducted
where people worked their way through the quizzes. As expected, there were the
occasional chuckles as people viewed the more humorous entries.
Reaction to the quiz from the KM project team was generally positive but skeptical
as to the potential value of the system. While this beta testing did not garner enthusiastic
support from the KM project, it did provide feedback used to determine the rough size
of the quiz, appropriate mix of questions, and what constituted a reasonable level of
difficulty for the questions.