From information technology to knowledge technology: taking the user into consideration

This paper focuses on the famous productivity paradox ‐ despite widespread investments in information technologies, very few of them can be shown to positively impact the productivity statistics. The authors argue that the way out of the productivity paradox is to transition out of traditional investments in information processing technologies, offering diminishing returns, to investments in knowledge technologies, offering increasing returns. They argue that such a shift, in order to be effective, must be built with a core focus on meeting the users’ needs in knowledge work. Topics reviewed include knowledge retrieval, including knowledge servers and their architecture; knowledge capture; and knowledge navigation and discovery. The paper concludes with an assessment of emerging knowledge technologies.