Many a little makes a mickle: enabling mailing list archive for corporate knowledge sharing

Many a little makes a mickle. The authors mean it for a concept whereby fresh pieces of knowledge are created everyday when only user use ordinary tools everyday. In this paper we focus on the mailing list out of everyday tools. Our analyses have taught us that mailing list has evolved to a point where it is now used for multiple purposes such as document delivery, work task delegation and so on. The direct use of mailing list archive is the key to successful knowledge sharing in busy white-collar workers. This paper presents a systematic data on usage and utility of mailing list for office work. According to this analysis, we also describe a novel knowledge management system, called "MailKnowledge". The MailKnowledge has some knowledge indexes that include: (1) human-relationship indexes, (2) who-knows-what indexes, (3) meeting related mail indexes and (4) similar thread indexes. Using these indexes, user can retrieve some knowledge such as human relationship, finding key person and document management. Although the knowledge retrieval performance is not as good as more integrated knowledge management systems, the easy-to-adopt feature of the approach should be welcomed by busy organizations.