Academics:   Master of Science in Information Management

NOAA’s hydrographic community is geographically dispersed and fragmented, making it difficult for members to effectively communicate and collaborate with one another. The current means and methods for knowledge creation, sharing, transfer and dissemination are inadequate and asynchronous with today’s advancing technologies, preventing NOAA from fully realizing its capabilities with respect to its nautical charting mission. This project considers the strategic importance of improving this situation and suggests a knowledge management strategy that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Executing this knowledge management strategy will create a community that is adept at the identification, acquisition, development, sharing and distribution, utilization and retention of knowledge. NOAA will be able to leverage available technologies to interconnect the members of the hydrographic community in a single online space regardless of physical location, with appropriate tools that enable effective communication and collaboration.

Currently, The Hancock and Lane (H&L) racing team’s information needs are not being met due to disparate resources. The data is not formally managed, structured or readily available, resulting in team members making less-informed decisions and missing performance opportunities. The information need is to have current, accurate, integrated information on short notice in a dynamic racing environment. Our proposed solution is to design a user-focused centralized information management system which will capture data from various systems and create an integrated resource, allowing H&L team members to input, view, search and report.

The power of the Internet comes from its connections. Currently, most audio on the web exists in an orphaned, disconnected state. In order to improve the flow of information between these audio media, connections should be designed and created, bridging these missing links. One possible method is to modify the current interface for listening to audio (play, pause, stop, previous/next and fast forward) to include follow-link-out and follow-link-back buttons, including an xml file that would contain metadata to describe when these audio links would happen and where they would link to. Audio Links will enable listeners to pursue additional aural information in a similar manner to web hyperlinks.

Mobile fieldworkers in any industry face increasing pressure to operate more efficiently while maintaining exceptional customer service. Seattle’s recent Hanukkah Eve storm and the much more traumatic disaster situation brought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita expose opportunities to improve fieldwork decision making. Mobile fieldworker expertise must be leveraged to realize true process efficiencies. Field Service Workers and Disaster Responders provide the perspective and insight to the right best practice approaches for information delivery in an unstructured and at times chaotic real-life work situation. This study demonstrates how user-centered query techniques, proper process measures and enhanced collaboration methods combine to create a best practice strategy in mobile fieldwork information management.

The goal of this project is to build organizational capability for a global Information Worker community by implementing more effective Information Management strategies. This solution addresses the needs of field leaders who work in Microsoft's Worldwide Public Sector organization--Public Sector Directors--and Regional/National Technology Officers. There are four specific deliverables: (1) Extending content and functionality on the existing Public Sector Portal to create a better process for sharing knowledge (2) Using the Big6 skills methodology, build an on-boarding orientation program for new members of this community (3) Updating a tracking mechanism for field readiness, the “Field Readiness Index” to reflect the requirements of a new fiscal year and (4) Working with the worldwide Technology Officer community, deliver a comprehensive curriculum for enhancing expertise around Public Policy and Technology issues.

The goal of our capstone project is to design a web portal for a condominium community located in Renton, WA. The portal will be a gateway to the community and will help in exchanging information between the board members, residents and buyers. It will enable the board members to host their meeting schedules and meeting minutes, provide the existing residents a comments/complaints page and a board management info page to centralize all communications to the board members. It will also act as a common portal to access neighborhood events such as community news, event schedules, recreation room schedules and any other general announcements. This will help in bridging the existing communication gaps in the community.

Data is becoming more pervasive on the internet with “users” or consumers of information becoming “innovators” or information makers. Yet, in the context of search, search queries remain confined within the vaults of search companies, making it close to impossible for academic researchers to do search research at an internet scale. Opening up the search vaults to the world is today not an option because of confidentiality issues. Users may be willing to give up some of their privacy for better consumer service, better protection, etc., but are not usually ready to give up the confidentiality of their online data, as their search queries define them. The ultimate goal of this research is to identify the range of issues around data confidentiality, while permitting a legitimate research use of the data by delivering solutions in terms of methods and processes working on large scale data assets.

Foodazo is an online community designed to merge the interests of both "Foodies" and restaurants/catering companies. This project includes the analysis of the online food businesses, the examination of enhancing end user's online experiences, and a compilation of recommendations provided by Jin, Ming and Tara to the Foodazo Company.

SmartWool’s partner site is a portal supporting global user groups as diverse as ad agencies, sales representatives, production mills and internal dealer services. The available content includes sales and marketing collateral, logos, product images and product packaging details. The current portal is managed without the benefit of a content management strategy or alignment with strategic goals. This project uses the wool supply chain as an analogy for a scalable knowledge management strategy, focusing on a content management strategy supporting domestic sales team and retailers. This next generation portal will increase value, functionality and usability by aligning content with strategic business goals, developing content to support assessed user needs, and increasing user awareness through education and business integration.

The Pacific Northwest Lesbian Archives (PNLA) is a newly forming non-profit seeking to collect and preserve archival materials from the lesbian community in the Pacific Northwest. This organization has specific information management needs: analysis and comparison of archival management systems and schemas; a database to manage volunteers; and information architecture recommendation for the organization's web site, incorporating navigation and site structure elements.

With only approximately 50 percent of Washington's high school students passing the math portion of the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) exam, the state legislature ultimately decided to continue math WASL testing but to postpone the graduation requirements until 2013. This has resulted in a state-wide concern for our graduating students as they will ultimately enter into higher education and/or competitive high-tech markets without the necessary skills for success. This project shows the results from math education research and interviews with Washington math educators and students. The results will pinpoint the challenges facing our math students and educators and how to best capture and transfer math knowledge from the educators and accomplished students to less skilled students. The project will highlight innovative digital technologies and group learning techniques (Communities of Practice) that can support this knowledge transfer and can be incorporated into Digital Learning Common's web site.

Community for Youth (CFY) focuses on helping inner-city, ‘high-risk’ teens in the Seattle School System navigate through the difficult years of high school. Beginning as 9th graders, CFY students are paired with an adult who acts as a mentor by setting goals, sharing experiences, and holding each other accountable for commitments and promises regarding academics and health. When compared to the general graduation rate of 60% for the Seattle Public School system, the 98% graduation-success rate for students who remain in CFY for 4 years is astonishing. This system design project addresses several concerns and allows CFY to become more efficient and effective in its mission of helping youth build life-long skills increasing their potential for success. These concerns include adding insight and controls for fund-raising, donor-management, recruitment and communication as well as exposing youth to the power and capabilities of technology and the Internet.

IRCO assists refugees, immigrants and multi-ethnic communities from 46 ethnic groups, who speak more than 30 languages, as they develop self-sufficiency, preserve their culture, and connect with social services. IRCO does not have a central system to manage client and program information; extensive paper files and Access and Excel tools are used. Their current process focuses on client needs and shortcomings, and many IRCO clients don’t trust information systems. The Value Sensitive Design methodology included three investigations: Conceptual, which identified direct and indirect stakeholders and values including strengths-based focus, cultural sensitivity, trust, family-centered, safety, self-sufficiency, unity, and resilience. An empirical investigation included interviews, observations and artifact study, and elicited the importance of intuition, oral tradition, attachment to artifacts, and mistrust of systems. A technical investigation found a stable Microsoft environment. The proposed solution provides effective central access to and management of information while respecting stakeholder values.

All of current the Web-based information retrieval systems take system-centric approaches. Users can do little to the search results and everything happens on the opposite side of the browser screen. In my IMT 542 course project, basic ideas for a new user-centered interactive information retrieval (IR) model and its interface were tested with a partial mock-up version written by Flash 8/ActionScript2. In this Capstone project, I combined those key pieces together with some static screen images then conducted user surveys to see if this was acceptable for general users. I further made some studies about whether the concepts of new interface could be implemented with current technologies.

Movies are the core of Scarecrow Video and "connecting people with what they’ve never seen or with what they’ve searched for over the years" is their mission. Our project objective is to provide recommendations and high impact deliverables that will facilitate the building of a movie nerd community, both online and offline. Through interviews of Scarecrow management and a survey of 200 customers, the need for improving the flow of movie knowledge between customers and Scarecrow became the foundation for building a movie nerd community. The nerd-grinder process was created as a response to this need. The nerd grinder is the learning process by which an uninitiated user becomes a member of the movie nerd community and thus a knowledgeable and more loyal Scarecrow customer. This includes several deliverables, a high level prototype of a learning vault web-site, database recommendations, customer communication mechanisms, and detailed user needs analysis.

To explore a more human-centered approach to the software development life cycle (SDLC)—especially in Bioinformatics where data and information is being generated at such a quick pace—I developed and implemented a small feature in Finch, a web application made by Geospiza, Inc. for the biological and life sciences. This feature provides a way to look at DNA from the protein perspective and view the six possible frame translations that may encode a gene. This project is the result of a user analysis, focused on finding answers to some user interaction questions with the protein translation feature. I chose to look at navigation, language, usefulness (does it meet their needs?), usability (is it user friendly?) and asked for use case scenarios (context analysis). The findings of these studies indicate that a modified approach to development could improve user experience, even for a small niche feature such as the one studied.

A website is an important tool for any organization. Act of Giving uses its website for two purposes: as an information resource for people in its own organization and as a marketing tool for promoting itself. However, the website had shortcomings in its navigational structure. Website viewers reported having trouble locating needed pages and had to resort to clicking every link to find what they wanted. This project encompasses redesigning the website's information architecture and navigation by means of assessing user needs, creating a prototype and refining the prototype through user testing. The project aims to deliver a prototype that can be handed to a developer and graphic designer to build a new website. Act of Giving is a volunteer-based non-profit foundation focused on raising funds for charitable efforts. Past charitable activities include raising $10,000 for the International Medical Corps and raising $20,000 for American Red Cross Hurricane Katrina Relief.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs [VA] employs a computerized patient-care documentation [CPD] system – i.e., electronic medical record [EMR] – which includes text progress notes and summaries (reports documenting medical care). Shortcuts aid those writing these documents – e.g., copying text from other documents, automatic insertion of ancillary data, boiler-plate text from templates – but obscure the original source of information. With each patient chart containing hundreds of documents, and over 700 million documents in the national VA system, users are hard pressed to find the information they need. This project aims to apply principles of information science – document design, consistent record quality and more efficient information retrieval [IR] – to improve the VA system through more readable, more usable and ultimately safer CPD.

The ASUW Experimental College is the largest student-run non-profit organization of its kind. We offer more than 200 classes to the University of Washington and general public, serving more than 3,000 students each quarter. Being a student-run organization, turnover is naturally high. This year’s graduation alone will cause one third of the staff to leave. Along with it, employees take their office knowledge and instructor experiences. In response to this, I would like to create a wiki-based intranet site for our office. This site will include a message board, a calendar, instructor archives and other knowledge materials. We have also made major cuts to our catalog this past year. In hopes to keep registration numbers high, we have developed a marketing plan which increases our Internet presence. We will be adding an RSS subscription component and improving the information architecture of the site by personalizing each class.

Interactive form-oriented web pages provide a platform for survey-based research data collection. Using standard web form components such as check boxes, option buttons, and text entry boxes enables the researcher to develop a comprehensive survey instrument with a user-friendly web browser interface. Direct integration of submitted responses into a web server hosted database enables immediate accumulation of survey results. The purpose of this project is to implement these by involving the design, development and administration of Web-based petitions/polls along with direct database connection to increase the participation of citizens over the Internet.

There have been few, if any, research studies comparing the challenges of eBusiness/eCommerce to eGovernment. The E2ECA research project at the UW, brainchild of Karine Barzilai-Nahon and Jochen Scholl, is one such study. In this Capstone project, I worked with Karine and Jochen in an exploratory first round of focus groups with local managers in eGovernment and eBusiness. The data have been gathered, and will now be analyzed for insights into what these two dimensions can learn from each other. We will create a research instrument for testing hypotheses we make from our analysis of the data.

This Capstone project was completed in a company that develops software solutions to help organizations achieve interoperability and derive business value from standard electronic transactions. For a customer-focused organization, easy document retrieval and collaboration among people who work directly with customers are paramount for ensuring process efficiencies. In the customer services department I have identified two needs, aligned with the team’s business objectives: to organize content related to customers and internal procedures, and to share information within the team and with other stakeholders in the company. My document management solution includes: Taxonomy creation and implementation. Classification of documents within the taxonomy and specifications for tagging with metadata. Redesign of the SharePoint intranet site from a user-centered perspective. My recommendations include: Best practices for maintenance, change control, and user workflow. Next steps for expanding the intranet site in an integrative collaborative and content-sharing environment.

The project uses Google Maps API to demonstrate the geographic distribution of various recruitment metrics from the Office of Admissions of the University of Washington. The goal is to help recruitment leadership make more informed, effective marketing decisions and improve the overall recruitment strategy. Students whose PSAT score is higher than the average UW admission SAT will be approached via email from Office of Admissions during their 11th grade. Individual reactions to the UW recruitment email (open, click links, order brochure, unsubscribe, etc.) and click-through behavior will be recorded. The HuskyLocator mashup tool will aggregate and analyze data from different sources. It will provide the information on: The perspective student population in every state Top three cities of each metric in every state The collective responses from the student recipients Segmented data based on academic interests specified in PSAT

This project proposes the framework of an information system for a Seattle furniture company. This medium-sized company is comprised of seven areas of operation, with little electronic communication: Administration, Accounting, Sales, Project Management, Estimating and Installation. Besides standalone systems used by Project Managers and the Accounting department, they do not have a web-based platform for all business units. Therefore, the company needs an information system to facilitate and streamline its internal operations. The new system will serve the entire company by generating quotes, invoices, budget sheets and sales numbers. It will allow administration access to vital company financial data and sales information to help forecast future needs. The deliverable includes business requirements analysis, system functional analysis, business flows and an ERD diagram. This framework will help the company to continue the next phase of the system build-up.

With tens of thousands of documents on corporation X’s document portal, content can easily get lost as users become overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the site. Searching helps to some extent, but search only helps users who know what they are looking for. Browsing helps too, but navigating a taxonomy is limiting insofar as it represents one view of the content. Furthermore, there is no mechanism for saving content once it is found, other than downloading or bookmarking it outside of the system. This project is aimed at increasing pathways to content on the portal using social networking technologies—tagging, bookmarking, commenting, RSS and blogs. Social networking represents a sea change in the way users behave on the web. Rather than accepting what content is pushed to them, users are now taking control of content—uploading, recommending, and tagging—and surfacing it based on unique viewpoints and articulated relationships.

iPEEPS started as a conversation about advising challenges. We had questions about classes, the MSIM program in general and future opportunities. We also had questions about where to buy cheap textbooks, which bus to take downtown and, of course, where to get good beer. While some questions were answered by faculty and staff, we often found ourselves turning to our peers for advice: what electives did you take, where did you find your internship, did Finns serve Guinness? With the arrival of the second cohort we found our roles expanding from advice seekers to advice givers. In order to facilitate this ongoing need and to support future cohorts, we decided to leverage our MSIM skills to develop this resource. It is our hope that iPEEPS, as it is passed on to future generations of day MSIM students, will evolve and morph.

The monumental expansion of the Seattle Art Museum included the Olympic Sculpture Park, an 8.5 acre park on Seattle's waterfront. Using data and technology, this project is dedicated to supporting the museum’s vision of "connecting art to life.” Following the creation of a detailed taxonomy and integrating open source content management software, Pachyderm 2.0, an immense collection of documents, images, video and audio about the sculpture park will be made available to staff and visitors. The searchable archive will be integrated into the museums multi-media project Close Ups, creating a comprehensive, technology-based, online eMuseum. The project also includes a proposal that explores information architecture and website design, a virtual gateway to the park. Providing dynamic access to more robust information will enhance the museum experience with the possibility of taking a folksonomic approach by allowing visitors to supplement the lexicon of curators through social tagging.

Computer technologies evolve rapidly, requiring greater computing power and continual upgrades of hardware and software. Our proposed Capstone project seeks to extend the life of older technologies by creating a vehicle of exchange between organizations with excess technology resources and those that lack the revenue to continually invest computer hardware and software. This project, a public and private technology exchange sponsored by the Foundation for International Understanding through Students, bridges companies and institutions that frequently upgrade their technological capabilities with organizations that can benefit from products that have outlived their usefulness elsewhere.

The proposed capstone project is a website for the purpose of providing technical support to the librarians of North Central Regional Libraries. NCRL consists of 28 libraries in the greater Central-Washington region. Many of these libraries are in remote locations and lack the technical expertise to trouble-shoot technical issues that arise. The website will save NCRL’s Automation Department time and money by providing onsite support for common technical issues.

Uniform Medical Plan (UMP) is a preferred provider organization administered by the Washington State Health Care Authority. UMP provides medical coverage for public employees and their dependents. UMP also provides its members with a comprehensive list of drugs covered by UMP PPO called “The UMP Preferred Drug List (PDL)." This project is to create the Uniform Medical Plan Online Preferred Drug Search page for the UMP members, pharmacists and medical providers. It integrates many aspects of information science, ranging from design and use of information systems, programming language to usability study. The goal of this project is to reduce full-time staff work load and improve customer service. The UMP members can use the Internet to find information about their prescription drugs e.g. drug's tier level, whether it is subject to prior authorization, drug coverage limitations or lists of less expensive alternatives for each prescription drug (if available).

The goal of visual analytics is to facilitate the analytic reasoning process by displaying large amounts of data in such a way to make it easy to understand and allowing one to make quick decisions based upon it. Our project draws upon this field to develop a way to display information (including both automated network data and manually entered user data) that can be used both in the assessment of security threats from within and in the identification of users who may require further information assurance education. We focus on internal network security because much of what exists in terms of products and solutions focus on the protection of internal resources from outside attackers despite the fact that it is statistically far more likely that a security breach will occur from within.