In an ideal situation, the organization would provide appropriately targeted instructions to these different groups of users. But given realistic constraints of staff and time, preparing these separate instructions could consume many hours of labor. Top About Mass-Customizing One promise of knowledge management is that information in a knowledge base can be tailored for different audiences and purposes at the time the computer presents that material to users. For example, if the knowledge base contains a set of general instructions and well-defined user profiles, it can determine which profile best matches a given user and tailor instructions when displaying them. Similarly, a knowledge base might contain one general set of instructions for performing a procedure.
Older approaches require end users to tailor information themselves.
They do so by bookmarking pages, writing notes in columns, and throwing out unnecessary sections. When the system performs the task of customizing the information, and does so without much or any involvement from the user, the process is called mass-customizing. Mass-customizing is widely used in some branches of the communication industry. For example, many television networks broadcast different versions of a single news story. They broadcast a brief story on the morning news show, an even shorter version on the evening news, a longer story during a news magazine, and an extensive story on their news website.