No tags, no access

Like many first semester students taking the MSLS program here at UKY, I took LIS600.  There we are provided with an overview of concepts important to library science, and we are asked to write a series of papers briefly going over a chosen topic.  I centered my second paper around the use of folksonomies, or tagging.  I compared and contrasted it with traditional cataloging and classification systems like LoC and Dewey.  Fast-forward to the present day, and I find myself employing the use of tags in not just this class, but also in LIS665: Digital Libraries, where the final project requires us to apply appropriate tags to each item in our digital library.  I suppose the point I’m trying to make here is that tagging is something that has stuck with me throughout my time in this program, and therefore I’ve had ample opportunity to reflect on how I use them.  In this blog post I’ll be sharing the tagging/bibsonomy strategies I employed for this course, how they evolved, and how I justify it.

To start, bibsonomy has been a great little tool for me.  I could use it to easily cite references used in my papers and blog posts with better accuracy than I could inputting them manually, and served as an ideal means of keeping track of what I had read.  I made bibsonomy use a part of my reading routines, having it open while I read so I could immediately add the publication/bookmark after I was finished.  The information would be fresh in my mind, so I could use more accurate tags that reflected my thinking of the time.  Given that this is my last semester in the program, it’s hard to say how often I’ll come back to bibsonomy, but I do wish I had known about it earlier.

Despite my desire for everything to be consistent, I did not have any formal rules with how I tagged the publications I read.  Like I mentioned in a comment on Jenn’s tagging post, I decided early on that it would been more work than I was willing to take on to ensure that all my tags were consistent.  In this case, that would have meant using the same vocabulary for the same concepts, a set number of tags for each publication, etc.  Folksonomies do not have to be constrained by controlled vocabularies for formal rules, and should serve to supplement such systems.  My tagging was organic, and I tagged with words that summed up passages or sections that resonated with me at the time.  For example, one of my tags for Polanyi’s book was “iceberg”.  When Polanyi first mentions the phrase, we know more than we can tell on p. 4, it reminded me of how I first came across the idea of tacit knowledge.  It was used in the context of competitive gaming, in how top players often know much more than they can articulate, and thus have a hard explaining how they got to be so good.  The analogy of an iceberg was used, and while I want to say the source of that was David Sirlin’s Playing to Win, going through it again with Ctrl+F isn’t yielding me answers.

The one thing I made sure to do with every publication was to tag it with its category: review, empirical, text, or paper.  The first two are self-explanatory, and “paper” was used for sources consulted for this course’s 15-page paper project.  “Text” was only used twice, for the class’s two required books.  The purpose of this was to keep track of how many in each category I had read to make sure I was keeping pace with the class requirements of 17 “Review” articles, and 16 “Empirical”.

Tags are a great way to casually keep track of one’s digital items, and more than once have I thought how nice it would be if there was a more intuitive way to tag existing documents and pictures saved on one’s hard drive.  Maybe I’ll send Microsoft some feedback about it someday…

References:

Polanyi, Michael. (2009). The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sirlin, David. (2006). Playing to Win. Lulu.com.

The Power of Showing Up

Several years ago, in the middle of my undergraduate studies, I decided it would be a good idea to try and learn Japanese on my own.  The reasons seemed silly in retrospect – I wanted to play Japan-exclusive role-playing games, and read the countless books and other print material related to my favorite game series’ that rarely made their way across the Pacific.  Being multilingual and exposing myself to a whole new culture and way of thinking?  A nice bonus.  In my endless search of new learning resources, I came across a blog titled “All Japanese, all the time”.  It was a collection of tips, anecdotes, and an avocation for a learning method I hadn’t considered up to that point: full-on immersion.  I learned quite a bit from that blog, but if there was one overarching takeaway I got, it was to simply show up.  In this case, allow myself to be exposed to Japanese wherever and whenever possible.  Make it a point to be there every day, and a great deal of learning will take care of itself.  When I think back on all the knowledge management literature I’ve read throughout the semester, I can’t help but feel that there are parallels to be drawn.  In Hara (2010) for example, there was a concern that less experienced attorneys were not learning as much as they could due to spatial separation from the more experienced attorneys.  They weren’t “showing up”, even if that wasn’t their intent.  The three articles I’ll look at in this post will be examined with this theme in mind.

The first article was a fun read for me, Knowledge transferred through organizational stories: a Typology.  This study involved interviewing reference librarians at various academic institutions on the types of stories that were told around the workplace.  Tim summarized in their own blog post how many of the stories tended to focus around something negative – poor decisions made by a previous manager, frustrating patrons, and disasters like a building fire that happened long before any of the current staff started on the job.  These stories can serve as a means of coping, and are also the gateway by which new staff are introduced to the job.  The culture of the workplace, as well as the “way of doing things” is imparted through informal story-telling, and can shape how the organization is viewed.  A lot of important organizational knowledge can be picked up by simply listening to others vent about some unpleasant patron interaction, and my own experience has indicated the people are often more than happy to share them.

“According to a survey reported by Reid G. Smith and Adam Farquhar, customer knowledge was quoted as the most important type of knowledge (97 percent) in order for organizations to act effectively.”  This is one of the opening quotes to Daneshgar & Parirokh’s An integrated customer knowledge management framework for academic libraries.  I was inspired to read this one after reading about Matt’s take on it, and my initial concerns on user privacy remain.  As the article mentions in the end, academic (as well as public) librarians have such an enormous wealth of tacit information on the patrons they serve.  How to deal with the quirks of specific patrons is one of the librarian’s many tools for typical reference/circulation activities, and protecting their privacy should be a high priority.  We need to be careful that the customer knowledge we use to better our services is spread broadly, and not heavily influenced by a select few.  In this case, “showing up” often means learning about people who are essentially strangers, and with that knowledge comes responsibility.

The last paper I looked at for this write-up, Revisiting knowledge transfer: Effects of knowledge characteristics on organizational effort for knowledge transfer, argues that frequency of contact with a knowledge source is a vital component of knowledge transfer.  This is especially so in the case of tacit knowledge, where frequent encounters are often necessary for effective transfer.  Perception of how easy or difficult the knowledge source is can affect how frequently it is consulted – familiarity with the source can increase the perceived closeness, and it will thus be consulted more.  Repeated contact is often the best way to learn difficult material, and no one should expect to become an expert with minimal consultation and study.

While my Japanese proficiency has regressed somewhat from disuse, I eventually got to the point where I could read and comprehend most of any book or game that found its way into popular Japanese media, and my listening ability wasn’t too shabby either.  No formal training needed, but it did require constant exposure.  Hours of reading and listening every day, but I was having so much fun it didn’t feel like work, and I picked up on so much.  I think this can apply to the transfer of organizational knowledge as well.  Show up, listen to the stories of your coworkers, and give yourself plenty of opportunity to be put in new situations.

References:

Colon-Aguirre, M. (2015). Knowledge transferred through organizational stories: a

typology. Library Management, 36(6/7), 421-433.

Daneshgar, F., & Parirokh, M. (2012). An integrated customer knowledge management

framework for academic libraries. The Library Quarterly, 82(1)

Hara, N. (2009). Communities of practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal

knowledge sharing in the work place. Information Science and Knowledge Management

(Vol. 13). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Kang, J., Rhee, M., & Kang, K. H. (2010). Revisiting knowledge transfer: Effects of

knowledge characteristics on organizational effort for knowledge transfer. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(12), 8155–8160.

Temporary Relief

It never fails that following the completion of a big class paper or project, I’m overcome with a huge sense of accomplishment and relief.  In this case, we as a class only finished a first draft of such a paper, but given the scope and the amount of concentrated effort that went into it, I’m not going to split hairs.  Yet there is still much work to be done.  In anxious anticipation of an initial grade and the comments of my student peers, I decided that my next set of article readings should be those that appeared to be tangibly related to my paper topic that I missed in the initial literature review, and that I should be actively looking for nuggets of wisdom I can either discuss directly in my revised paper, or use them as a springboard for further research.  For context, my paper dealt with how libraries can use wiki technology to facilitate intra-organizational knowledge management, with the Grace (2009) article serving as my initial inspiration.

The actual implementation of wikis in the library is one of the central discussion points of my paper, and so naturally I gravitated towards Chalmeta et al on the Methodology for the implementation of knowledge management systems.  In this paper, the authors outline a roadmap to be used in the development and implementation of knowledge management systems, arguing that doing increases the chances of success, and lowers the level of complexity.  Somewhat to my dismay, the article seemed to focus far more on the development of original KM systems, rather than implementing and modifying existing ones.  While it is certainly possible to development one’s own wiki software, that is mostly beyond the scope of my paper topic.  This is not to say I got nothing out of it – chief components of Chalmeta et al’s proposed methodology, such as “analysis and identification of the target knowledge” and “classification and representation” are relevant and applicable.  Having a methodology in general is critically important, with part of the reason wikis can fail is lack of direction and purpose.  I can also look at it in terms of setting up the IT infrastructure to support an internal wiki.  Christy’s blog post noted how methodologies for general information systems development are problematic when designing KM systems, and perhaps the same is true for implementation.

One of the ways in which I was hoping to expand my paper was to examine potential relation of wiki use to theories surrounding the “community of practice”.  Duguid et al on “The art of knowing”: Social and tacit dimensions of knowledge and the limits of the community of practice had one statement in particular that stuck with me

“You become an economist by entering an economics department in Chicago, or Berkeley, or Columbia—a route that may mark you for life, in part because the tacit knowledge of the local community profoundly shapes your identity and its trajectory.” Duguid et al, 2005, 113

Whether one intends to or not, the culture of one’s workplace is going to have some influence on how problems are approached, as well as what forms of technology will become familiar.  The libraries that tended to be most receptive to the adoption of wiki technology were those whose staff were familiar with it, whether it was in a previous workplace, or personal experience using Wikipedia or another wiki.  It is difficult to adjust to change when habits have been built up over many years, which was one of the challenges noted by the authors of my paper research.

The aim of Amin et al’s Knowing in Action: Beyond Communities of Practice was to determine if CoPs encourage a specific type of learning, and if the term should apply when describing the knowledge practices of very different types of communities (specifically craft/task-based, professional, epistemic/highly-creative, and virtual).   In each of the four types of communities, knowledge is produced in different ways, and the method in which people interact within the communities can also vary markedly.  My assumption is that many libraries fall into the “professional” category, where innovation comes incrementally.  Furthermore, tacit knowledge is highly important in this environment, perhaps more so than explicit, codified knowledge.  The paper uses the health care industry as their example, noting that part of the job is knowing who holds what knowledge, and thereby gaining the ability to accurately refer people others for specialized questions.  Knowing that the same is more or less true in the library environment, the implementation process of a KM system in the library should take these factors to heart.

Although my paper is primarily concerned with advocating for increased wiki use in libraries, the articles I reviewed expanded upon several challenges that should be acknowledged and addressed.  Is there an explicit reason why the wiki should be used/implemented?  Is the current work culture conducive to what might be a radical change in how the staff collaborate and share knowledge?  Reflections on current knowledge creation/exchange among library staff are also needed.

Amin, A., & Roberts, J. (2008). Knowing in action: Beyond communities of practice.
Research Policy, 37(2), 353–369.

Chalmeta, R., & Grangel, R. (2008). Methodology for the implementation of knowledge
management systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology, 59(5), 742-755.

Duguid, P. (2005). “The art of knowing”: Social and tacit dimensions of knowledge and
the limits of the community of practice. Information Society, 21, 109-118.

 

Email Hell

I’ve never been a big fan of email.  Never liked always having to give it out for every site I register for, and playing “email-tag” with fellow project collaborators is never a fun experience.  Thousands of messages go unread in my various inboxes, and there’s no sense of urgency to do anything about it.  I learned a long time ago at work that the only way to reliably get anyone’s attention is to poke one’s head in at their office, and bypass the whole email thing.  No doubt that they too, have thousands upon thousands of unread mails starring them down every time they open their inbox, and it’s too easy to put off a request from a co-worker for as long as possible.  A patron I was helping on the computer once confided in me that as long as it doesn’t involve registering his email somewhere, he was fine with whatever solution I proposed, lest he fall into “email-hell”.  An extreme term, but I like it.

I requested access to Pillet (2016)’s Email-free collaboration: An exploratory study on the formation of new work habits among knowledge workers article on ResearchGate some time back, and the author only recently granted it.  Their article explores the idea of employing alternative collaboration tools, as well as potential challenges and pitfalls.  They found that in many knowledge-intensive organizations, employees are often flooded in never-ending chains of emails, and understandably, feel overwhelmed and burnt-out as a result.  The idea of an email deluge is linked to performance and productivity, indicating that workers are more stressed out and try to multi-task more when they try to be more attentive to their emails.  An interesting experiment was conducted at a scientific organization where the emails are turned off for five days, with results indicating a positive trend of increased focus on tasks, along with reducing of the stress mentioned above.  That being said, I do have concerns about some of the alternatives proposed, such as social media applications.  If productivity is a concern, I’m not sure that encouraging an open Twitter feed at work is such a great idea, and my hunch is that the same people who compulsively check their emails are likely to have similar habits on social media.  Another potential issue mentioned in the study trying to replace email is technology upheaval.  Email is just one technology that is so ingrained in the work culture that trying to suddenly supplant it with something else, even if it’s demonstrably better, is very disruptive.

Ackerman’s Sharing knowledge and expertise: The CSCW view of knowledge management. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, does not discuss emails at great length, but one could say that the technology falls under what they consider the “repository” model of CSCW views on knowledge management.  Issues with the repository view are apparent, such as lack of motivation to contribute, and a need for information to be periodically updated.  While email facilitates collaborative undertakings and has elements of a “community of practice” indicative of a second generation knowledge management tool, it is inefficient compared to more modern KM tools.  This is especially so in what Jones et al defines as a high-velocity environment – “those environments in which there is rapid and discontinuous change in demand, competitors, technology, or regulation, so that information is often inaccurate, unavailable, or obsolete.” (Jones, 2012, p. 775) The primary example used here is the military, where soldiers working in life or death situations require up-to-date knowledge delivered as instantaneously as possible.  The value of tacit knowledge is evident here, and often the best way to get a fast answer is to directly draw from a social network of close individuals.  Hence, poking my head in someone’s office.

In spite of the issues involved, email is probably here to stay for quite a bit longer.  There exist a great wealth of alternative technologies – I wrote my paper on one of them, being Wikis – yet the ubiquity of emails means that it’s tough to uproot without upsetting well-established routines, and is “good enough” for most purposes.  There is also the issue of how to respond to large-scale privacy breaches that sometimes occur on popular social media sites, like Will addressed in their post on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica mess. I guess I should steel myself for the reality that I’ll be stuck in “email hell” for the rest of my professional life.

References

Ackerman, M. S., Dachtera, J., Pipek, V., & Wulf, V. (2013). Sharing knowledge and
expertise: The CSCW view of knowledge management. Computer Supported
Cooperative Work, 22, 531-573.

Jones, N. B. & Mahon, J. F. (2012) Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent
environments. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(5), 774-788.

Pillet, J. C., & Carillo, K. D. A. (2016). Email-free collaboration: An exploratory study
on the formation of new work habits among knowledge workers. International Journal of Information Management, 36(1), 113–125.

 

Trust in the Face of Adversity

The afternoon of February 6^th was routine – I made a fruit smoothie, chatted with my mother a bit, and afterwards I would prepare to go on a walk around the neighborhood.  The monotony was broken up when my sister came to the table with her laptop in hand, with what looked like a streaming website on the screen.  The stream was of SpaceX’s test launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket, carrying one of CEO Elon Musk’s luxury cars set to orbit the sun.  My mother and I had not heard of the event, and it was fascinating to see in real time.  It also made my mother very nervous.  She remembered what happened with Challenger over 30 years ago, and even though the Falcon Heavy rocket was unmanned, there was still a sense of tension that was hard to shake.  Thankfully, the launch was a success, and we left the table knowing we have a car orbiting the sun.  After that, I knew that at some point during the semester I had to read Kumar et al on Bounded Awareness and the Challenger disaster.  This blog post will take a look at that in addition to two other articles on KM in the context of disaster:  Chua et al on A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective, and Ibrahim et al’s Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry.

The morning of the Challenger launch was cold – far colder than previous launches had to deal with, and there was concern among the engineers that the ship’s O-rings would not function properly.  They implored management to delay the launch, but despite their concerns the launch proceeded as planned.  As the article points out, the managers were not merely business-people with no working knowledge on how rockets work.  On the contrary, many were probably engineers themselves at one point, and were highly knowledgeable people.  In this case, the managers were bounded by their own tacit knowledge gained from countless successful launches in the past.  They saw the information presented by the engineers through a different lens, and while not dismissive, they did not see it being as relevant as the engineers made it out to be.  To me this also indicated a lack of trust between the two parties.  The managers preferred to trust their own existing knowledge over that of the engineers, even though the engineers had the advantage of spending a much greater deal of their work time around the faulty equipment that ultimately caused the failure.

The next article I looked at examined a more recent disaster, hurricane Katrina, and compared it the far less devastating Rita that occurred shortly after.  Federal response to Katrina was slow, and for a while the various support organizations involved did not appear to be coordinating very well.  State and federal agencies acted independently, with multiple people seeming to be in charge.  This stands in stark contrast to the Rita response, where cooperation between agencies was high, and trusted each other enough to do their jobs.  This trust had not been established when Katrina first hit, but going through such a disaster together no doubt provided a powerful learning experience from which to base it around.  While other factors, such as the politics of the time, cannot be ignored, trust and the better organization that came with it played a significant role in Rita’s markedly quick response.

Often operating in relative isolation with dangerous machinery and chemicals, oil rigs must be well prepared to deal with a crisis.  In this environment where a mistake or misdirection could be life-threatening, trust between individuals is more important than ever.  Such was the subject of Ibrahim’s study.  One case study in particular was highlighted, where 13 firefighters died in the Mann Gulch disaster.  Communication broke down between the firefighters and the foreman, and orders were not followed.  The firefighters did not know the foreman, and what little communication occurred between them was not clear, and evidently did not inspire confidence.  It’s not as if the firefighters were not adequately trained, but there was no time to build trust and assure one another that they knew what they were doing.  Hindsight is 20-20 and we can talk about how the instructions could have been communicated differently, but it is at least clear that once again, trust is an essential component of successful information transfer.

Stephen summed up the Ibrahim article with:

“In disasters, knowledge can mean the difference between life and death, and so can the effective transfer of that knowledge.”

Especially after reading the three articles highlighted here, I’m inclined to agree.  Not only does knowledge have to be communicated effectively, but also very quickly.  Without trust between the acting individuals and agencies, there is not as much incentive to follow on the fly instructions, or there will be hesitation where such a thing cannot be afforded.  There is already so much uncertainty in an active disaster situation, and the consequence of communication failure can be fatal.

Chua, A. Y. K. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a
knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society of Information
Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528

Ibrahim, N. H., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents:
Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society of Information Science
and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928

Kumar J, A., & Chakrabarti, A. (2012). Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge:
Revisiting Challenger disaster. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(6), 934-949.

Sources of Organizational Knowledge

On the surface, my readings the last few days have been all over the place.  I did not select them with a singular theme in mind like I did for past blog posts, but I like to think that I have connected these three works in a way that makes sense.  First up was Gressgård et al. on Use of information and communication technology to support employee-driven innovation in organizations: A knowledge management perspective.  While I generally understood the broader points of the study, something just felt off about the writing somehow.  It didn’t appear hard to follow, but I was constantly getting lost.  Curious to know if others who read it felt similarly.  Second was Lam et al’s Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management, and finally Chua et al in their Starbucks case study Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks.  While each of these articles appear to focus on radically different areas, I found that they are all asking that for at least parts of their studies, the question of who supplies knowledge.  In other words, where does an organization harvest its expertise?

As the title of Gressgård et al suggests, their study asks how knowledge management tools can be used to complement what they refer to as “EDI” – employee-driven innovation.  More specifically, innovation spawned from the more “rank-and-file” employees, and not necessarily managers.  As the study notes, employees often possess a great wealth of tacit knowledge surrounding their work environment and day to day activities that their managers won’t (of have forgotten).  For the employee to be more involved in the innovation of their organization, there must be greater inter-organizational transparency in how and where knowledge is kept.  Following that, it is not enough to simply provide a tool where employees can share their ideas.  If managers and other higher-ups do not participate and provide adequate feedback, employees become discouraged and won’t feel like their ideas are being heard.  In order for such systems to work, and thus have the desired effect of increased EDI, a system of knowledge collaboration needs to be firmly ingrained into the organization.  Instilling such a system takes a significant time-investment however, and managers may not like that they won’t have as much control over the flow of ideas.

The topic of Lam et al’s study takes organizational knowledge gathering a step further, and looks at ways in which knowledge can be outsourced.  Contracting a third party to help generate and impart knowledge can be an effective strategy if an organization is under-staffed, or said staff lack the proper training, to name a couple reasons.  Such was the situation with Lam’s case study investigating the KM practices of Fenton University (FU), and the creation of their online courseware.  FU lacked sufficient staff to develop quality online courses, and so this task was contracted to an outside organization.  Thus, FU is able to launch their courses in a timely manner without taking on the burden of additional staff they don’t need to run the courses themselves.  While the theory of outsourcing seems fair, I do worry about becoming overdependent on outside sources for knowledge.  Possible dangers of outsourcing where highlighted in the literature review of the study, and “lack of organizational learning” and “loss of innovative capability” where two I thought were especially important.  If the staff are not absorbing at least some of the knowledge that is being imparted upon them by their contracted third party, they’re in trouble should the arrangement falter.

The above studies looked at gathering knowledge from experts within and outside the organization.  Chua et al’s case study of Starbucks looks at the possibility of gaining knowledge from non-experts – the social media savvy public.  Facing economic uncertainty, Starbucks turned to social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and even developing their own app, MyStarbucksIdea.  They found great success in these platforms, promptly addressing customer concerns and listening to their ideas.  To expand on Amber’s discussion of the same article and social media knowledge in general, I would say that even the negative comments have the potential to be useful.  There will always be some who will never be satisfied, but if they’re receiving consistent criticism about a product or service, it might be worth reevaluating, and keeping abreast of this kind of public perception is important considering how fast information spreads on social media (see Hemsley 2013 in the “review” section).  Having a constant presence also gives Starbucks the opportunity to control their own narrative.  If something goes awry, or misinformation starts to spread, they have the chance to set the record straight and reduce some of the blowback.

I think it is reasonable to conclude that useful knowledge can be derived from a diverse array of sources, ranging from the upper management, to a college-aged coffee addict.  The challenge, then, is figuring out an efficient way to channel all these sources of knowledge, and instilling an organizational culture conducive to continued knowledge acquisition and open innovation.

Chua, A. Y. K., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social
media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 17(2), 237-249

Gressgård, L. J., Amundsen, O., Aasen, T. M., & Hansen, K. (2014). Use of information
and communication technology to support employee-driven innovation in organizations:
A knowledge management perspective. Journal of Knowledge Management, 18, 633-650

Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the
social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1)

Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for
knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43.

Not sure why I posted that, but I’m glad I did

Riding off the heels of my last blog post on social media, I wanted to continue reading into the topic from the empirical side of things.  Thus the articles I selected to read were from that category and had titles that appeared to be relevant.  Bharati et al’s Better knowledge with social media? Exploring the roles of social capital and organizational knowledge management, Yuan et al’s The use of different information and communication technologies to support knowledge sharing in organizations: From e-mail to micro-blogging, and Wasko et al’s Why should I share? Examining social capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice were read this time around, and while each study differed in their methodologies and focus, one question was universal to all three: How do we motivate employees to share their knowledge?

My last blog post touched upon some of my own personal reservations about sharing on social media, and these readings helped to shed a little light on why some people contribute little or nothing at all.  One of the findings of the Wasko study suggests that people are unlikely to contribute if they feel they are lacking in cognitive capital – in other words, expertise and experience.  It may not seem worth it contribute even if one is willing, if they do not feel their knowledge is worthwhile or relevant.  Yuan et al, whose study focused on the Chinese branch of a multinational software company, introduced another angle, in that even knowledgeable experts might withhold information as sharing it would undermine their own personal competitive advantage, or that of their organization’s.  Makes sense in an environment where businesses are in active competition with one another, and giving away of specialized or insider knowledge puts them at a disadvantage.  As they also mentioned, this is not necessarily the case in a cooperative work environment, one example being that of a public library consortium.  While reading these papers I tend to always think back on my own work experience in libraries and how the theories and case studies might be applied there.  We had quite a few KM tools to contribute to, and an issue we found ourselves grappling with is which ones we should even be using.  Should we make a post in the usual online Notebook, or would it be more appropriate to make a separate Word document pinned to the desktop?  Yuan et al’s subjects expressed similar frustrations, being overwhelmed with the many tools at their disposal along with the lack of a directory.  Furthermore, contributing and codifying one’s knowledge takes time, time that many employees don’t have in the work place.  If there is little or incentive to contributing, motivating employees to do so on their own time is a challenging prospect indeed.

Wasko’s 2005 article takes a more positive tone, and investigates reasons why someone would share on social knowledge management tools.  Since taking the time to share one’s personal expertise on social outlets like forums, listservs, Facebook groups, etc provides no obvious benefits to the contributor, there must be something else to it.  One reason might be that by frequenting these groups and providing quality assistance increases one’s professional reputation in the field.  They become well known in online spaces for their contributions, and this can reflect positively on potential employers.  I think Robert brought up an interesting point in his recent blog post, asking the question of why employees value reputation to begin with.  While Wasko et al’s study measures individual centrality on their tested message board, it’s still limited as it does not take into account the activities of folks who don’t contribute (or “lurkers”).

Another reason Wasko et al note that is perhaps more applicable to my own personal experiences is simply that helping others feels good.  Receiving recognition for one’s contribution, even it’s just a simple thanks, can improve my mood and motivate me to continue contributing.  Last year I joined a professional social group of librarians on Facebook, called Library Think Tank, and while I have not contributed yet, I enjoy reading the insights and people from different institutions deal with complicated issues.  For people whose knowledge helps define who they are and how they perceive themselves, it may be the chief motivator.

Bharati, P., & Chaudhury, A. (2015). Better knowledge with social media? Exploring the
roles of social capital and organizational knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge

Prestley, Robert (2017). Blog 3: Knowledge Transfer. Retrieved from https://rprestley.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/blog-3-knowledge-transfer/

Wasko, M. M., & Faraj, S. (2005). Why should I share? Examining social capital and
knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice. MIS quarterly, 29(1), 35-57.

Yuan, Y. C., Zhao, X., Liao, Q., & Chi, C. (2013). The use of different information and
communication technologies to support knowledge sharing in organizations: From e-mail to micro-blogging. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology, 64(8), 1659-1670

 

Should I retweet this?

Like many millennials, I spend a great deal of time every day on the internet.  Research, school, and media consumption make up a significant portion of my online hours, as well as social media.  I’m not a big Facebook guy, but I can spend a considerable amount of time browsing my Twitter feed each day.  In the beginning of the semester I noticed a few of the articles had to do with knowledge in the social media environment, and I knew I wanted to read up on those.  While not exclusively on traditional social media outlets, I selected three papers that focused on this topic, as well as Web 2.0 – Hemsley et al’s Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age, Levy (2009)’s Web 2.0 implications on knowledge management, and Grace (2009)’s Wikis as a knowledge management tool.

Pretty much all social media applications fall under the umbrella of “Web 2.0”, which can succinctly be summed up as “People”, part of a quote from a WIKI Solution’s then CEO, Mayfield (Levy, 2009).  User interaction drives the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and has contributed enormously to how we interact with knowledge.  Indeed, this blog itself would not be possible otherwise, nor would this online course.  The Levy article brings up some concerns of CEOs skeptical of the financial benefits of Web 2.0, mainly in terms of profit margins.  For most of us, this is not a focal point of interest.  My concern is with knowledge accessibility, something Web 2.0 applications excel in, and that Hemsley et al discusses in their paper on content virality.  I can pursue a graduate degree no matter my geographical location (not exactly – I still need internet access, an issue worthy of its own blog post), and any skepticism I would have evaporates with that idea.

For those unfamiliar with how Twitter works, users will see bite-sized posts (up to 240 characters) from accounts they follow in a feed with the newest stuff on top, and can like or “retweet” those posts – essentially passing it on to one’s own follower base.  This concept of passing on content to others is one of the central research points of Hemsley et al, and they argue that the virality of content on social media can direct mass attention to topics that might have simply faded into obscurity otherwise.  Probably common knowledge to anyone who spends a great deal of time on these platforms, but this particular passage caught my eye: “Each person who participates in a viral event has effectively voted on the content twice through their duel decisions so that the resulting event has been deemed relevant and worth spreading in some way.” (Hemsley 2013, p. 147).  Not only does the reader have to be interested enough to click on or read the post, they also have to make the conscious decision to share it through retweets or reposts.  Some post with over 100K retweets has essentially been curated twice by that many people.  Not a revolutionary concept, but one I hadn’t thought about before and one that leaves me thinking of further questions that weren’t addressed.  For example, are certain age-groups or communities more likely to make that crucial second “vote” than others?  How much does one’s personality factor into such a decision?  Personally I rarely take this second step, even if I find the content amusing or relevant, often asking myself “I might like this, but does it really need to be broadcast to my entire follower-base…?”

Many of us have probably gone down the Wikipedia rabbit hole at some point.  We’re reading an article, and it links to another interesting article, then another, and so on.  Grace (2009) goes at length on the strength of wikis as knowledge management tools in organizations, and the concept is a fascinating one to me.  Imagine you’re working at a public library, and they have their own wiki set up catered strictly to their interests.  Articles on how to adequately serve particularly needy patrons, or one on troubleshooting the building’s scanner might be possibilities, and wikis are characterized by the fact that any user with access can edit them so they stay up to date.  Something like this would have been immensely helpful at my old library page job, and is a topic I’m interested in exploring further, potentially as a paper topic.  If I thought my follower-base would have been interested, I might have even retweeted the paper and my idea…

Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge

Management, 13(4), 64-74.

Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the

social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1),

138-167.

Levy, M. (2009). Web 2.0 implications on knowledge management. Journal of

Knowledge Management, 13(1), 120-134

Background Knowledge?

For my first real blog post for this course, I’d like to preface it by saying that prior to reading any of the material, I had very mismatched expectations going into this class.  When I received Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension in the mail, I was surprised by how small it was.  Peering over its contents did little to alleviate my confusion, and instead contributed to it.  I realized that this class was going to be far more philosophical than I had anticipated – while this is not inherently a bad thing, it does mean that I will be working outside of my comfort zone, academically speaking.  With that in mind, I thought it prudent to select articles that might provide general overviews on the topics of tacit knowledge and its related concepts to ease myself into it.

Based on the title, Blackler’s Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: an overview and interpretation seemed to be just what I was looking for.  Blacker’s work summarizes some of the popular literature surrounding knowledge organization in the workplace, especially in the context of knowledge providing a competitive advantage. Having read the first part of Polanyi prior to reading this article, I was in the mindset of knowledge as a dichotomy, between tacit and explicit.  Thus, the section where Blacker identifies five types of knowledge in the literature review stuck out to me, if only to shatter some of my preconceived notions.  Here we learn of embodied, embedded, embrained, encultured, and encoded knowledge, and while describing each one of these is beyond the scope of this post, it opened my eyes to the multifaceted nature of knowledge, a nature I hadn’t explicitly thought about before, but perhaps my mind was unconsciously taking advantage of.  As an example, much of the knowledge associated with cultural cues and arbitrary meanings assigned to words in our language could be considered tacit, but parts of it can certainly be codified.  In any case, the purpose of the article was not inculcating the reader into this way of thinking, but rather to emphasize the concept of analyzing knowledge as a process, and not something we “have”.  That it is more productive to analyze the systems in an organization that generate knowledge than trying to document types of knowledge that are needed.  While I did not get the impression the paper spent as much on this topic as I would have liked, I was engaged with some much needed background knowledge, and later I can read more on “activity theory” briefly described in the article.

Continuing my reading of works with generic-sounding titles, Kimble’s Knowledge Management, codification and tacit knowledge sounded like a good pick.  While it did not cover the same sort of ground as the Blackler did, the section on Cowan’s analysis was fascinating to me.  Much of what he had to say was in line with my initial reactions on reading about tacit knowledge, mainly in asking the question of “why can’t we codify it?”, and that the term “tacit knowledge” is being used too often in the literature to describe things that can, in fact, be codified.  I found myself agreeing with a good deal of it, and so it is curious then the third article I read served to criticize much of the Cowan analysis: Johnson’s Why all this fuss about codified and tacit knowledge?

While it wasn’t one of their central points of disagreement, they took issue with the concept of the “codebook”, something that I too found dubious.  I’m not convinced a codebook with agreed-upon language and standards is necessary in a great number of fields.  I draw upon my experience in several competitive gaming circles, where jargon is rampant, and many different terms can mean the same thing.  Yet in many of these communities, inconsistency like this is perfectly fine.  Spend just a little bit of time in these communities and it all starts to come together, and you will also quickly realize that the language evolves, and new concepts are constantly being introduced.  It’s not worth anyone’s time to write a codebook containing the codified knowledge and standards of the game/community, as it will be out of date by the time it’s finished.  This is not to say that the knowledge can’t be codified – just that the process need not be standardized.

Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: An overview and
interpretation. Organization Studies, 16(6), 1021-1046.

Kimble, C. (2013). Knowledge management, codification and tacit knowledge.
Information Research, 18(2).

Johnson, B., Lorenz, E., & Lundvall, B. A. (2002). Why all this fuss about codified and
tacit knowledge? Industrial and Corporate Change, 11, 245-262.

First post?

Somehow I just didn’t feel comfortable leaving the default first post alone, so here’s a pic of me and our German Shepard, Fenrick.  Let’s have a great semester!