Personalised Domain

Email

E-mail was initially designed as an electronic asynchronous communication tool (Whittaker & Sidner 1996). Since recently, most people store their activities and information in their respective e-mail accounts. Many researchers look into how people actually manage their information via e-mail. According to Boardman and Sasse (2004), e-mail is the one of the most successful individual information management tools. The set of messages in an e-mail account reflects the life of the account owner because many of his/her life’s highlights are stored therein, either in the e-mail inbox or in the archives section (Voida, Harmon & Al-Ani 2011).

Structure: There is no doubt that e-mail provides rich information to individuals. To classify all these information, e-mail account owners manage their e-mail using folder hierarchies. Folders are constantly reorganised, some folders are created, and other folders are emptied and deleted (Brutlag & Meek 2000). Recently, a system was created and implemented in which once an e-mail account owner creates a hierarchical structure of folders, most e-mail services assist the user by providing the function of automatic message classification. There are many examples of the e-mail classification system, but the main tool for it is text-based classification (Kiritchenko & Matwin 2001). Most of the text-based approaches classify messages into pre-defined categories based on their texts. POPFile is one of the most successful tools for automatic e-mail classification (Kamens 2005).

Blog

Blog was introduced as an information-sharing technology that updates and exchanges ideas/interests (Kavanaugh et al. 2006). It is generally maintained by an individual who shares his/her thoughts through such technology, a process called “self-disclosure.” (Ko & Pu 2011). This technology allows people to observe an individual activity by accessing each post (Higgins, Reeves & Byrd 2004). According to Fitzpatrick (2007), blogs are used as both knowledge-sharing and personal-work/information storage spaces. Most blogs have a specific topic, such as food, travel, entertainment, or movies, which coincide with the administrators’ areas of interest (Nakajima et al. 2005).

Structure: The users update their ideas and interests through a process called “blog post.” Blog posts are usually arranged in chronological order. Moreover, most blog posts are categorised by predefined directories. Some users classify blog posts in the pre-defined categories by manually clicking on or selecting them. Many blog services automatically classify posts using various features, such as titles, tags, and descriptions. A typical example

of this technology is tag-based blog classification, which has received much attention from researchers of late (Sun, Suryanto & Liu 2007).

Knowledge Management

In organisations, document management is becoming increasingly important because the system structure in the industrial field is becoming increasingly complicated. Most document classification activities are done by people in the organisation. To classify the documents in the organisation, people use the tacit knowledge rather than explicit knowledge. With the tacit knowledge, it might cause problems because people are not usually aware of the importance or exact meaning of the knowledge. Many researchers have been worked on transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. There are several widely-used methods to transform knowledge, such as cognitive mapping (Rodhain 1999), Ikujiro Nonaka’s model (Erden, Krogh & Nonaka 2007). Almost all organisations engage in knowledge management, which involves the values from the organisation’s assets (Juang, Lin & Kao 2008). Many organisations have adopted a computer-based system that supports the integration of decision and knowledge management. This system is called “knowledge management system” (KMS) (Cheng, Lu & Sheu 2008). A KMS is a virtual repository of relevant information for organisational knowledge workers (Dalkir 2005). KMS was originally designed as a proce ss of applying a systematic approach that includes knowledge acquisition, storage, and dissemination. After that, KMS came to be used by organisational workers and provided feedback from the users (Richardson, Courtney & Haynes 2006).

As mentioned earlier, the KMS process involves four activities. First, explicit and tacit knowledge is acquired. Explicit knowledge is put in either paper or electronic format while tacit knowledge is organised from people’s minds. Second, the collected knowledge is stored in electronic-document form in a virtual repository and is accessed and shared by the employer. In the end, the knowledge is utilised by the workers, and the feedback is updated by the users. The process flow of KMS are well declared in Roknuzzaman, Kanai & Umemoto 2009 and King 2009. Benefits: KMS presents several benefits to organisations. Here, five benefits will be reviewed. First, KMS encourages users to manage new ideas and information in the free flow of data. Second, it tends to manage their customers well by providing accurate information and instant response. Third, it expands the organisation’s revenue as both products and services are marketed much faster than ever. Fourth, it encourages the rate of employee retention by letting the organisation to recognise the value of knowledge. Further, organisations are led to create inducement programs by motivating their employees to share information and knowledge. Finally, it streamlines the organisation’s operations, and

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the organisation’s costs are reduced as the system eliminates the redundant or unnecessary processes (Batten 2008).