Thursday, May 1, 2014
Folksonomy
I created, piecemeal, a folksonomy over on CiteULike for this class. Probably the most helpful thing I did for myself was create a "research" tag for primary research articles, so I could keep track of how many I'd read (and, by extension, how many review articles I'd read). I tried to create a kind of knowledge web by using primarily small tags for big ideas-- breaking down main concepts into a handful of tags, which might apply to other readings over time. So I might click "economy" if I want to see the entire thread of my readings about the knowledge economy, or "social_media" if I wanted to expand on that idea, etc. I'd planned to stop creating new tags at a certain point, so all tags could theoretically connect one reading to others concerning that topic, but that didn't end up panning out-- I needed to include an element of longer tags which tried to get at the central difference of this reading from the others, which meant I was still making new tags on the very last day of term. In that way, my tags functioned as both a note-taking system and the cataloging system I'd intended.
Final Push
I had a moment of panic when I sat down to choose my final readings (as I believe my approach has made clear, I didn't exactly map everything out ahead of time), and I realized I only had 30 items in my CiteULike library! As I was meant to end up with 35 (23 review articles + 10 research articles + 2 books) by the end of term, that would have meant having five readings to analyze for this post, which would have been a disaster. (For a certain definition of the word disaster.)
Fortunately, I'm pretty good at math, and I knew this was impossible. I lined up my blog post bibliographies and went through my CiteULike library chronologically, and I realized I got distracted while analyzing the Massingham piece a few weeks back and forgot to stick it in my library. So I added that and then I was good to go with the four I had intended.
Except I couldn't manage to track down one of those (the doi doesn't exist?) so I had to pull in a last-minute fifth title as a substitution anyway.
The creation of this blog post is an excellent metaphor for this entire semester.
I began with Hemsley & Mason. I liked this piece right off the bat because the term "knowledge ecosystem" makes me feel a lot more keenly invested in this idea than "knowledge economy" ever has. Maybe it's the science education in my background, but the implication of interrelatedness and living interdependency gets me excited. (I'm a nerd.) This is especially appropriate for social media, which very much depends on human interaction and can change in a minute-- it's dependent on individuals, but also much bigger than they are. Harnessing this power from a knowledge management standpoint has been one of the recurring themes of the semester.
The article also started off with the anecdote of the "United Breaks guitars" video-- a song I had stuck in my head for weeks in 2009 when I first watched the video. So its illustrative power was personal. It reminded me very much of the idea of social capital as well-- audience in social media is very much controlled by followers.
Gandhi supplies an even more succinct (hard to believe XD) definition of knowledge management in her piece: "organizing to know." That's incredibly apt, because a lot of what we've been talking about this semester is about putting knowledge in a form and in a system where others can access and use it. This application originated in the business world, then bridged over into libraries. Gandhi delineates in a way I've never quite seen before the differences between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, in a kind of scaffolding humanity. Then she takes apart the components of KM-- which she considers to be knowledge, management, IT, and corporate culture. I almost think corporate culture is part knowledge and part management-- it's a system-wide understanding of how things work here.
This piece was interesting to read for me, because I work in a library which employs a few KM strategies to accomplish what she is talking about. We have an online database into which we post reference questions we get, for the benefit of other librarians who may receive and have to deal with similar reference issues.
Kumar's article returns to a concept I feel like I've dealt with a lot: crisis knowledge management. It addresses the Challenger disaster from the perspective of "bounded awareness." "Bounded awareness" is an idea from behavioral economics that decision makers often overlook relevant information (which can result in suboptimal outcomes.) The question, then, is how to manage knowledge so that all relevant information is not only readily available but obvious and utilized. A lot of this concerns tacit knowledge, which pertains to the methods managers use to consider their options.
Finally (really finally this time), I read Chalmeta and Grangel. I've read a lot about proposed knowledge management systems or evaluations of knowledge management systems, but not a lot about implementing new ones. But it makes sense to me that it wouldn't be a universal. Different companies work differently, and different systems will work for them. It makes sense that they would also require different methods of application. (Different. I don't think I've said that word enough yet.) The paper had similar feelings-- the word "adapt" was used a lot.
~*~
Readings Discussed
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. doi:10.1002/asi.20785
Gandhi, S. (2004). Knowledge management and reference services. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(5), 368-381. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2004.06.003
Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizatational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1), 138-167. doi10.1080/10919392.2013.748614
Kumar J, A., & Chakrabarti, A. (2012). Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge: Revisiting Challenger disaster. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(6), 934-949. doi:10.1108/13673271211276209
Fortunately, I'm pretty good at math, and I knew this was impossible. I lined up my blog post bibliographies and went through my CiteULike library chronologically, and I realized I got distracted while analyzing the Massingham piece a few weeks back and forgot to stick it in my library. So I added that and then I was good to go with the four I had intended.
Except I couldn't manage to track down one of those (the doi doesn't exist?) so I had to pull in a last-minute fifth title as a substitution anyway.
The creation of this blog post is an excellent metaphor for this entire semester.
I began with Hemsley & Mason. I liked this piece right off the bat because the term "knowledge ecosystem" makes me feel a lot more keenly invested in this idea than "knowledge economy" ever has. Maybe it's the science education in my background, but the implication of interrelatedness and living interdependency gets me excited. (I'm a nerd.) This is especially appropriate for social media, which very much depends on human interaction and can change in a minute-- it's dependent on individuals, but also much bigger than they are. Harnessing this power from a knowledge management standpoint has been one of the recurring themes of the semester.
The article also started off with the anecdote of the "United Breaks guitars" video-- a song I had stuck in my head for weeks in 2009 when I first watched the video. So its illustrative power was personal. It reminded me very much of the idea of social capital as well-- audience in social media is very much controlled by followers.
Gandhi supplies an even more succinct (hard to believe XD) definition of knowledge management in her piece: "organizing to know." That's incredibly apt, because a lot of what we've been talking about this semester is about putting knowledge in a form and in a system where others can access and use it. This application originated in the business world, then bridged over into libraries. Gandhi delineates in a way I've never quite seen before the differences between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, in a kind of scaffolding humanity. Then she takes apart the components of KM-- which she considers to be knowledge, management, IT, and corporate culture. I almost think corporate culture is part knowledge and part management-- it's a system-wide understanding of how things work here.
This piece was interesting to read for me, because I work in a library which employs a few KM strategies to accomplish what she is talking about. We have an online database into which we post reference questions we get, for the benefit of other librarians who may receive and have to deal with similar reference issues.
Kumar's article returns to a concept I feel like I've dealt with a lot: crisis knowledge management. It addresses the Challenger disaster from the perspective of "bounded awareness." "Bounded awareness" is an idea from behavioral economics that decision makers often overlook relevant information (which can result in suboptimal outcomes.) The question, then, is how to manage knowledge so that all relevant information is not only readily available but obvious and utilized. A lot of this concerns tacit knowledge, which pertains to the methods managers use to consider their options.
Finally (really finally this time), I read Chalmeta and Grangel. I've read a lot about proposed knowledge management systems or evaluations of knowledge management systems, but not a lot about implementing new ones. But it makes sense to me that it wouldn't be a universal. Different companies work differently, and different systems will work for them. It makes sense that they would also require different methods of application. (Different. I don't think I've said that word enough yet.) The paper had similar feelings-- the word "adapt" was used a lot.
~*~
Readings Discussed
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. doi:10.1002/asi.20785
Gandhi, S. (2004). Knowledge management and reference services. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 30(5), 368-381. doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2004.06.003
Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizatational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1), 138-167. doi10.1080/10919392.2013.748614
Kumar J, A., & Chakrabarti, A. (2012). Bounded awareness and tacit knowledge: Revisiting Challenger disaster. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(6), 934-949. doi:10.1108/13673271211276209
Friday, April 25, 2014
Ten Down
...and one to go!
Because the number of readings did not quite perfectly align with the number of blog posts for the semester, this post and the final one (slated to appear on May 1) will each contain four articles instead of the usual three. So fasten your seatbelts!
I began with an article by L.M. Lucas, because one of my favorite concepts I've taken from this course so far was one from long ago about trust, and how it is reinforced or even built from scratch through the act of knowledge transmission. Whereas the paper from which I drew that conclusion dealt with the oil industry, Lucas worked with electrical company employees from Fortune 500 companies. Lucas's findings were a bit more along the lines of common understanding than those I discussed lo these many weeks back-- he found that trust and reputation play into employees' willingness to share critical information, and that these things take time to develop. But the paper ended up saying something I can really get behind, which is that the creation of an open and trusting environment is good for organizational knowledge transfer. Managing the environment manages employee behavior.
Much like the Lucas piece, the Jones & Mahon article I read for my penultimate blog post was chosen because it hearkened back to some pieces I read earlier this semester about crisis and KM in highly volatile or emergent situations. This one focused on the military to examine tacit and explicit knowledge transfer in situations that can change in quick and important ways. The importance of tacit knowledge is especially underscored.
Hansen et al gives us a nice run-down of various KM strategies out there, and what organizations are doing to try to decide which ones will work best for them. Right off the bat, this piece grabbed me with its acknowledgement of a divide I've thought about this semester: that KM practices are practically as old as humanity, but that KM theory is relatively new. It then divides KM systems by ideology-- are they more focused on people or process? Either way seems to this paper's authors to be reasonably effective, but attempts to combine these strategies (or "straddle" the line between them) fail, in part because the people who work more smoothly with one strategy may not be able to shift easily to another type of system.
Finally, Goggins and Mascaro had a very interesting take on the idea of distance. They discuss the idea that technology literally makes the world a smaller place through examination of a rural IT firm and the ways it uses technology to lessen the impact of physical distance. This is especially relevant to organizations located in rural areas, because the space-to-person ratio is a bit different than that found in cities. This has real-world implications as to the nature and timing of collaboration between members.
Tune in next week for one more post and then a final wrap-up!
~*~
Readings Discussed
Goggins, S. P., & Mascaro, C. (2013). Context matters: The experience of physical, informational, and cultural distance in a rural IT firm. The Information Society, 29, 113-127. doi:10.1080/01972243.2012.758212
Hansen, M. T., Nohria, N., & Tierney, T. (1999). What's your strategy for managing knowledge. Harvard Busindess Review. URL: http://consulting-ideas.com/wp-content/uploads/Whats-your-strat-art.pdf
Jones, N. B. & Mahon, J. F. (2012) Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(5), 774-788. doi:10.1108/13673271211262808
Lucas, L. M. (2005). The impact of trust and reputation on the transfer of best practices. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(4), 87-101. doi:10.1108/13673270510610350
Because the number of readings did not quite perfectly align with the number of blog posts for the semester, this post and the final one (slated to appear on May 1) will each contain four articles instead of the usual three. So fasten your seatbelts!
I began with an article by L.M. Lucas, because one of my favorite concepts I've taken from this course so far was one from long ago about trust, and how it is reinforced or even built from scratch through the act of knowledge transmission. Whereas the paper from which I drew that conclusion dealt with the oil industry, Lucas worked with electrical company employees from Fortune 500 companies. Lucas's findings were a bit more along the lines of common understanding than those I discussed lo these many weeks back-- he found that trust and reputation play into employees' willingness to share critical information, and that these things take time to develop. But the paper ended up saying something I can really get behind, which is that the creation of an open and trusting environment is good for organizational knowledge transfer. Managing the environment manages employee behavior.
Much like the Lucas piece, the Jones & Mahon article I read for my penultimate blog post was chosen because it hearkened back to some pieces I read earlier this semester about crisis and KM in highly volatile or emergent situations. This one focused on the military to examine tacit and explicit knowledge transfer in situations that can change in quick and important ways. The importance of tacit knowledge is especially underscored.
Hansen et al gives us a nice run-down of various KM strategies out there, and what organizations are doing to try to decide which ones will work best for them. Right off the bat, this piece grabbed me with its acknowledgement of a divide I've thought about this semester: that KM practices are practically as old as humanity, but that KM theory is relatively new. It then divides KM systems by ideology-- are they more focused on people or process? Either way seems to this paper's authors to be reasonably effective, but attempts to combine these strategies (or "straddle" the line between them) fail, in part because the people who work more smoothly with one strategy may not be able to shift easily to another type of system.
Finally, Goggins and Mascaro had a very interesting take on the idea of distance. They discuss the idea that technology literally makes the world a smaller place through examination of a rural IT firm and the ways it uses technology to lessen the impact of physical distance. This is especially relevant to organizations located in rural areas, because the space-to-person ratio is a bit different than that found in cities. This has real-world implications as to the nature and timing of collaboration between members.
Tune in next week for one more post and then a final wrap-up!
~*~
Readings Discussed
Goggins, S. P., & Mascaro, C. (2013). Context matters: The experience of physical, informational, and cultural distance in a rural IT firm. The Information Society, 29, 113-127. doi:10.1080/01972243.2012.758212
Hansen, M. T., Nohria, N., & Tierney, T. (1999). What's your strategy for managing knowledge. Harvard Busindess Review. URL: http://consulting-ideas.com/wp-content/uploads/Whats-your-strat-art.pdf
Jones, N. B. & Mahon, J. F. (2012) Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(5), 774-788. doi:10.1108/13673271211262808
Lucas, L. M. (2005). The impact of trust and reputation on the transfer of best practices. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(4), 87-101. doi:10.1108/13673270510610350
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Like in my last post, I chose to read a piece this week dealing with academic libraries. As I mentioned last week, I'm interested in an academic track, so these articles have a particular relevance to my projected future. The Townley piece begins with a discussion of what I've been thinking of in my head as "feral" knowledge management systems-- those created in the wild in response to perceived need and separate from any formal KM theory or information professionals. It treats knowledge as an environment to be manipulated as well as an asset to be capitalized upon.
It also features one of the cleaner definitions of KM I've seen-- "Knowledge management may be defined as the set of processes that create and share knowledge across an organization to optimize the use of judgment in the attainment of mission and goals. It is an emerging discipline developing on the
interstices of organizational psychology, library and information science, economics, and computer science. It involves capturing an organization’s goal-related knowledge as well as knowledge of its
products, customers, competition, and processes, and then sharing that knowledge with the appropriate people throughout the organization. Further, knowledge management seeks to support
communities of practice in creating and using knowledge. Finally, it accepts the notion that knowledge transmission is primarily a human activity. Thus, knowledge management is the art of creating value from an organization’s knowledge assets."
The Tsoukas piece defining organizational knowledge makes a few good points about the organic natues of knowledge creation and sharing within organization, and the tacitness of its existence. I get a real sense reading this piece that "organizational knowledge" is worth more than the sum of its parts-- that there exists an invisible reservoir of knowledge that is more than any one person can know.
Finally, I chose to read an article on "informational cities" because it was a term I found intriguing. It relates to the concept of the information society which has been mentioned in many of the readings. in some ways, this makes it difficult to take seriously-- all the readings I've done so far related to the (romantic) (idealized) information society have been skeptical (as my classmates can attest). It talks about the shrinking of the world in response to digital information technology and "glocalization" (which is a word I hated on sight). The idea of community interaction is one that appeals to me but I find this kind of forward-thinking optimism a little cloying. I do, however, enjoy the idea of a city-- as an organization, above-- as a living thing, separate from and greater than the individuals that make it up.
~*~
Readings Discussed
Stock, W. G. (2011). Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 62(5), 963-986. doi:10.1002/asi.21506
Townley, C. T. (2001). Knowledge management and academic libraries. College and Research Libraries, 62(1), 44-55. URL:http://crl.acrl.org/content/62/1/44.short
Tsoukas, H. (2001). What is organizational knowledge. Journal of Management Studies, 38(7), 973-993. doi:10.1111/1467-6486.00268
It also features one of the cleaner definitions of KM I've seen-- "Knowledge management may be defined as the set of processes that create and share knowledge across an organization to optimize the use of judgment in the attainment of mission and goals. It is an emerging discipline developing on the
interstices of organizational psychology, library and information science, economics, and computer science. It involves capturing an organization’s goal-related knowledge as well as knowledge of its
products, customers, competition, and processes, and then sharing that knowledge with the appropriate people throughout the organization. Further, knowledge management seeks to support
communities of practice in creating and using knowledge. Finally, it accepts the notion that knowledge transmission is primarily a human activity. Thus, knowledge management is the art of creating value from an organization’s knowledge assets."
The Tsoukas piece defining organizational knowledge makes a few good points about the organic natues of knowledge creation and sharing within organization, and the tacitness of its existence. I get a real sense reading this piece that "organizational knowledge" is worth more than the sum of its parts-- that there exists an invisible reservoir of knowledge that is more than any one person can know.
Finally, I chose to read an article on "informational cities" because it was a term I found intriguing. It relates to the concept of the information society which has been mentioned in many of the readings. in some ways, this makes it difficult to take seriously-- all the readings I've done so far related to the (romantic) (idealized) information society have been skeptical (as my classmates can attest). It talks about the shrinking of the world in response to digital information technology and "glocalization" (which is a word I hated on sight). The idea of community interaction is one that appeals to me but I find this kind of forward-thinking optimism a little cloying. I do, however, enjoy the idea of a city-- as an organization, above-- as a living thing, separate from and greater than the individuals that make it up.
~*~
Readings Discussed
Stock, W. G. (2011). Informational cities: Analysis and construction of cities in the knowledge society. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 62(5), 963-986. doi:10.1002/asi.21506
Townley, C. T. (2001). Knowledge management and academic libraries. College and Research Libraries, 62(1), 44-55. URL:http://crl.acrl.org/content/62/1/44.short
Tsoukas, H. (2001). What is organizational knowledge. Journal of Management Studies, 38(7), 973-993. doi:10.1111/1467-6486.00268
Friday, April 11, 2014
As we approach the end of the semester (and I begin making arrangements for my final four blog posts), I realize I have begun to understand concepts and vocabulary that were very difficult for me to handle at the beginning of the semester. I also see that there is a lot of material I am not going to get to! This week I found a variety of interesting-seeming literature to approach, because I don't have many more of these to write.
The bad thing about coming to Alavi this late in the term is that it's an overview of a lot of theories I've become acquainted with piecemeal, and it's hard to latch on to any ideas I consider new or interesting about them when I've already seen them through so many lenses. I think this would be a great piece for newcomers to KM-- essentially, it makes the argument that KM is complex and can fulfill many different types of roles within an organization (retrieval, sharing, and creation of knowledge both explicit and tacit).
Huber returns to what I've learned is a favorite topic of mine, knowledge exchange. Here it is framed as organizational learning-- creation and transmission of knowledge between members of an organization, which will ideally better the working processes therein. It plays around with the idea of experimentation as a method for knowledge creation (which Huber thinks does not predict long-term success), and the extent to which learning from experience can be passed along. My favorite idea in this piece is the idea of "grafting," which is acquiring new members who possess knowledge from other areas and bringing them into your organization. I've seen this happen in real life but never had the process explained this way; it seems like an elegant way of explaining a certain kind of knowledge mixing.
The Jantz piece was of particular interest to me, because I intend to work in an academic library once I'm out of school. This is one of very few KM resources which discusses libraries specifically, and exceptionally few that deal in any way with the idea of using KM to serve others. Up-and-coming KM systems seem to be improving methods for academic librarians to be effective information brokers (terminology I fell in love with in one of my classes last semester).
Less than one month to go!
Huber returns to what I've learned is a favorite topic of mine, knowledge exchange. Here it is framed as organizational learning-- creation and transmission of knowledge between members of an organization, which will ideally better the working processes therein. It plays around with the idea of experimentation as a method for knowledge creation (which Huber thinks does not predict long-term success), and the extent to which learning from experience can be passed along. My favorite idea in this piece is the idea of "grafting," which is acquiring new members who possess knowledge from other areas and bringing them into your organization. I've seen this happen in real life but never had the process explained this way; it seems like an elegant way of explaining a certain kind of knowledge mixing.
The Jantz piece was of particular interest to me, because I intend to work in an academic library once I'm out of school. This is one of very few KM resources which discusses libraries specifically, and exceptionally few that deal in any way with the idea of using KM to serve others. Up-and-coming KM systems seem to be improving methods for academic librarians to be effective information brokers (terminology I fell in love with in one of my classes last semester).
Less than one month to go!
~*~
Readings discussed
Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (2001). Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues. MIS Quarterly, 25(1), 107-136. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250961
Huber, G. P. (1991). Organizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures. Organization Science, 2(1), 88-115. URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634941
Jantz, R. (2001). Knowledge management in academic libraries: Special tools and processes to support information professionals. Reference Services Review, 29(1), 33-39. doi:10.1108/00907320110366778
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Research, research, research
I find research articles to be simultaneously a little easier to engage than review pieces and a bit more complicated to tease meaning out of. Review articles have the path laid out before them in a way research articles do not, but they are also bigger and somewhat unwieldy. This is something of a departure for me, because my history in biology taught me to be thankful for the rare review article that would help me decode the hundreds of research articles out there, in library school I have been more interested in primary research. In that spirit, I have chosen exclusively research articles to give myself something of a treat as spring (finally) rolls in.
Kelly posed an interesting question about social media that (in combination with this comment left by a classmate on my last post) helped to form my approach to this material. I chose he Yuan and Zhao article because if its concern with online "social" technology in knowledge sharing, and the Massingham because it returned to the idea of risk. The Wasko and Faraj piece deals with the idea of social capital, which I found very interesting a few posts back.
Yuan and Zhao returns to the idea that knowledge has an economic value, and that efficient knowledge sharing can have a huge impact on the potential success or failure of an organization. They address the fact that formal knowledge transmission systems often fail, and that social media has begun to fill the void of exchange in user-generated content. Of the 21 employees interviewed, 15 stated they used social media (blogs, wikis, etc. provided to them by their company) to share knowledge about their jobs. 14 used traditional KM tools like databases (but those in the R&D department seemed to find such tools outdated), and all 21 used communication tools (telephone, email, etc.). It seems that any way to reach other people is going to be used to exchange knowledge. More strikingly, users of social media reported it to be more effective than traditional KM tools.
Wasko and Faraj's piece was a breeze to read, possibly because all its cited sources and theories were things I have already read in my KM studies! I've noticed a high rate of recursion, but never more so than working on this post. I saw a lot of names I recognized and a lot of vocabulary I've picked up, too! They take the concept of social capital and break it down into parts-- reputation, the tendency to enjoy helping, ease of access by others, expertise, experience, commitment, and reciprocity. All of these factors seemed to have a positive impact on one's likelihood of advancing one's knowledge (or of collaborating with others to solve a problem). Those at the center tended to act as a hub, frequently transferring knowledge to others and receiving high ratings for helpfulness over the course of the study (if answers were deemed unhelpful, that was weighed differently from giving a helpful answer, from not answering at all, etc.)
Ultimately, Massingham's paper was the one I struggled most with, for no particular reason I can name. I think the writing was fine and clear, and the concepts on their own weren't too difficult. I guess I just wasn't in the best frame of mind when I approached it. Essentially, it exposes a hole in the tree model of problem solving, and asserts that a greater understanding of knowledge management constructs would allow for a more nuanced risk management approach. This would allow members of an organization to appropriately triage and treat problems more efficiently. A knowledge-based approach helps differentiate risks better than a risk-based system, which helps organizations deal with those different risks as their needs require.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Massingham, P. (2010). Knowledge risk management: A framework. Journal of Knowledge Management, 14(3), 464-485. doi:10.1108/13673271011050166
Kelly posed an interesting question about social media that (in combination with this comment left by a classmate on my last post) helped to form my approach to this material. I chose he Yuan and Zhao article because if its concern with online "social" technology in knowledge sharing, and the Massingham because it returned to the idea of risk. The Wasko and Faraj piece deals with the idea of social capital, which I found very interesting a few posts back.
Yuan and Zhao returns to the idea that knowledge has an economic value, and that efficient knowledge sharing can have a huge impact on the potential success or failure of an organization. They address the fact that formal knowledge transmission systems often fail, and that social media has begun to fill the void of exchange in user-generated content. Of the 21 employees interviewed, 15 stated they used social media (blogs, wikis, etc. provided to them by their company) to share knowledge about their jobs. 14 used traditional KM tools like databases (but those in the R&D department seemed to find such tools outdated), and all 21 used communication tools (telephone, email, etc.). It seems that any way to reach other people is going to be used to exchange knowledge. More strikingly, users of social media reported it to be more effective than traditional KM tools.
Wasko and Faraj's piece was a breeze to read, possibly because all its cited sources and theories were things I have already read in my KM studies! I've noticed a high rate of recursion, but never more so than working on this post. I saw a lot of names I recognized and a lot of vocabulary I've picked up, too! They take the concept of social capital and break it down into parts-- reputation, the tendency to enjoy helping, ease of access by others, expertise, experience, commitment, and reciprocity. All of these factors seemed to have a positive impact on one's likelihood of advancing one's knowledge (or of collaborating with others to solve a problem). Those at the center tended to act as a hub, frequently transferring knowledge to others and receiving high ratings for helpfulness over the course of the study (if answers were deemed unhelpful, that was weighed differently from giving a helpful answer, from not answering at all, etc.)
Ultimately, Massingham's paper was the one I struggled most with, for no particular reason I can name. I think the writing was fine and clear, and the concepts on their own weren't too difficult. I guess I just wasn't in the best frame of mind when I approached it. Essentially, it exposes a hole in the tree model of problem solving, and asserts that a greater understanding of knowledge management constructs would allow for a more nuanced risk management approach. This would allow members of an organization to appropriately triage and treat problems more efficiently. A knowledge-based approach helps differentiate risks better than a risk-based system, which helps organizations deal with those different risks as their needs require.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Massingham, P. (2010). Knowledge risk management: A framework. Journal of Knowledge Management, 14(3), 464-485. doi:10.1108/13673271011050166
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. doi:http://www.jstor.org/stable/25148667
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. doi:10.1002/asi.22863
Friday, March 28, 2014
I return!
After a hiatus of far too long (cliff's notes version: schoolwork, internship at Library of Congress, death in the family, more schoolwork), I return with another blog post. I returned to the tried-and-true method of choosing titles at random to read for this post, so I'm just going to have (completely blind) faith that they have anything in common worth talking about.
The first piece I looked at was Lam and Chua's case study on knowledge outsourcing. This article was rather obtuse and I had difficulty piecing it together, so please let me know if I missed anything important! Faculty members and members of the online courseware development team at Fenton University were interviewed to glean a rich picture of outsourcing in the online course community. Essentially, they found that people at one step in the process identify knowledge needs and then choose someone to provide knowledge to meet those needs. Then, if the knowledge provider is satisfied with the terms of the negotiation, the knowledge is delivered. This allows for a timely and quality learning process.
However, there are risks involved in knowledge outsourcing, including poor utilization by the client, may not meet the standards required, or being miscommunicated. This makes sense, because the ore steps are added to a process, the more opportunities there are to mess it up. However, since it is not feasible for one person-- or even one organization!-- to know everything, even everything they need to know, outsourcing still makes a lot of sense in the corporate world and in other situations.
Tremblay's piece, unfortunately, was similarly difficult for me to break down, but I'll take a stab at it nonetheless. It returns to the concept of the "information society" that I addressed in an earlier post. Like the earlier piece I discussed, Tremblay's article is skeptical verging on hostile toward the vague-yet-idealized notion of the "information society," and instead breaks down information exchange as a series of economic and social theories in practice. I would not say I enjoyed this article. It felt longer than it was, and I came away from it with a confused kind of pessimism. Tremblay asserts that no one knows where information technology is headed, but that people who have so far made predictions are most definitely wrong, because their pictures are too global and too simplistic.
Finally, I circled back to an article that discussed knowledge risks within organizations. Trkman and Desouza explored the dangers of sharing too much or two little. As Whitney and I discussed at this post of hers, collaboration and information sharing is a double-egded sword; while all parties share the benefits of shared information, all parties also share the risk or reprisal in the event of something going wrong. In an economic sense, there is also the risk of loss of competitive edge; if competitors have all the useful information your company has, you may no longer be able to beat them at doing what you both do.
This represents a take on knowledge sharing I hadn't thought of. I don't tend to think in these sorts of clearly-delineated capitalist ways, but I suppose it's rather obvious. Given that knowledge has an economic value (it can be sold, bartered, or even just leveraged for higher worth of its holder), it makes sense that it would also need to be controlled for the preservation of the capitalist market.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43. doi:10.1108/13673270910962851
Tremblay, G. (1995). The information society: From Fordism to Gatesism. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20(4), 461-482. URL: http://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/891/797
Trkman, P., & Desouza, K.C. (2012). Knowledge risks in organizational networks: An exploratory framework. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 21(1), 1-17. doi:10.1016/j.jsis.2011.11.001.
The first piece I looked at was Lam and Chua's case study on knowledge outsourcing. This article was rather obtuse and I had difficulty piecing it together, so please let me know if I missed anything important! Faculty members and members of the online courseware development team at Fenton University were interviewed to glean a rich picture of outsourcing in the online course community. Essentially, they found that people at one step in the process identify knowledge needs and then choose someone to provide knowledge to meet those needs. Then, if the knowledge provider is satisfied with the terms of the negotiation, the knowledge is delivered. This allows for a timely and quality learning process.
However, there are risks involved in knowledge outsourcing, including poor utilization by the client, may not meet the standards required, or being miscommunicated. This makes sense, because the ore steps are added to a process, the more opportunities there are to mess it up. However, since it is not feasible for one person-- or even one organization!-- to know everything, even everything they need to know, outsourcing still makes a lot of sense in the corporate world and in other situations.
Tremblay's piece, unfortunately, was similarly difficult for me to break down, but I'll take a stab at it nonetheless. It returns to the concept of the "information society" that I addressed in an earlier post. Like the earlier piece I discussed, Tremblay's article is skeptical verging on hostile toward the vague-yet-idealized notion of the "information society," and instead breaks down information exchange as a series of economic and social theories in practice. I would not say I enjoyed this article. It felt longer than it was, and I came away from it with a confused kind of pessimism. Tremblay asserts that no one knows where information technology is headed, but that people who have so far made predictions are most definitely wrong, because their pictures are too global and too simplistic.
Finally, I circled back to an article that discussed knowledge risks within organizations. Trkman and Desouza explored the dangers of sharing too much or two little. As Whitney and I discussed at this post of hers, collaboration and information sharing is a double-egded sword; while all parties share the benefits of shared information, all parties also share the risk or reprisal in the event of something going wrong. In an economic sense, there is also the risk of loss of competitive edge; if competitors have all the useful information your company has, you may no longer be able to beat them at doing what you both do.
This represents a take on knowledge sharing I hadn't thought of. I don't tend to think in these sorts of clearly-delineated capitalist ways, but I suppose it's rather obvious. Given that knowledge has an economic value (it can be sold, bartered, or even just leveraged for higher worth of its holder), it makes sense that it would also need to be controlled for the preservation of the capitalist market.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43. doi:10.1108/13673270910962851
Tremblay, G. (1995). The information society: From Fordism to Gatesism. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20(4), 461-482. URL: http://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/891/797
Trkman, P., & Desouza, K.C. (2012). Knowledge risks in organizational networks: An exploratory framework. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 21(1), 1-17. doi:10.1016/j.jsis.2011.11.001.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Social Media and the Innovation of Organizations
I really enjoyed one of the articles I read for my last post, so I decided to begin with another by the same author. It relates to social media, which is a passion of mine, so I was quite excited to delve into it.
According to the paper, Starbucks uses social media in a variety of ways to disperse information, encourage active engagement, and even redefine the role of the consumer in the company. This has major implications for any service-based organization-- in order to form a positive association in the minds of consumers and gain their business, it helps to interact with them outside the physical store. Social media is a huge part of mainstream life now, and social networks are huge breeding grounds for unconventional information behaviors. Like any new technology, appropriate use of it can be immensely helpful to businesses.
After Chua, I moved on to something a little meatier. Nanahapiet discusses the idea of "social capital" as an agent for the creation and dispersal of "intellectual capital." Essentially, this means that within systems involving people working together, some people have higher status (formal and informal), and those people are more efficient innovators and more likely to have an audience within the system to share their innovations. In some ways, this is intuitive, but as models of human behavior go, it's admirably clean. This provides a handy illustration of the advantages of organizations-- free agents will neither produce the creativity of work as those well-situated in organizations nor have a mechanism in place to share their methods with others doing the same kind of work.
This led me nicely into the third article I chose to deal with today-- Nonaka's piece on organizational knowledge creation. This is the densest paper of the three for this post, but its argument boils down to the idea that proper use of organizations can help new knowledge grow and improve as it spreads. In this way, as above, knowledge creation is interactive and dependent on a larger community to thrive.
A few links of note: this Huffington Post article on tips for organizational work; my classmate Kelly's thoroughly entertaining post about social media and disaster; Rebecca's post which uses the same article to no less thoughtful and entertaining effect.
~*~
Readings Discussed:
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. doi:10.1108/13673271311315196
Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/259373
Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2635068
According to the paper, Starbucks uses social media in a variety of ways to disperse information, encourage active engagement, and even redefine the role of the consumer in the company. This has major implications for any service-based organization-- in order to form a positive association in the minds of consumers and gain their business, it helps to interact with them outside the physical store. Social media is a huge part of mainstream life now, and social networks are huge breeding grounds for unconventional information behaviors. Like any new technology, appropriate use of it can be immensely helpful to businesses.
After Chua, I moved on to something a little meatier. Nanahapiet discusses the idea of "social capital" as an agent for the creation and dispersal of "intellectual capital." Essentially, this means that within systems involving people working together, some people have higher status (formal and informal), and those people are more efficient innovators and more likely to have an audience within the system to share their innovations. In some ways, this is intuitive, but as models of human behavior go, it's admirably clean. This provides a handy illustration of the advantages of organizations-- free agents will neither produce the creativity of work as those well-situated in organizations nor have a mechanism in place to share their methods with others doing the same kind of work.
This led me nicely into the third article I chose to deal with today-- Nonaka's piece on organizational knowledge creation. This is the densest paper of the three for this post, but its argument boils down to the idea that proper use of organizations can help new knowledge grow and improve as it spreads. In this way, as above, knowledge creation is interactive and dependent on a larger community to thrive.
A few links of note: this Huffington Post article on tips for organizational work; my classmate Kelly's thoroughly entertaining post about social media and disaster; Rebecca's post which uses the same article to no less thoughtful and entertaining effect.
~*~
Readings Discussed:
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. doi:10.1108/13673271311315196
Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. The Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266. URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/259373
Nonaka, I. (1994). A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5(1), 14-37. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2635068
Saturday, February 22, 2014
I decided to analyze exclusively research articles this week. All three pieces selected (Chua's "A Tale of Two Hurricanes," Ibrahim and Allen's "Information Sharing and Trust During Major Incidents," and Wong and Lu's "Knowledge Transfer in Response to Organizational Crises") deal with information sharing during times of crisis.
What I learned from these articles is that information sharing is incredibly important during crises; what differentiated the responses to hurricanes Katrina and Rita was the proper implementation of knowledge shared early in the preparations for the hurricanes. Wong and Lu took the same lesson to business organizations-- essentially, in order for any community, whether it is a company or an entire state, to survive any crisis, whether one of business or a cataclysmic event, it is necessary for people to transfer critical knowledge to the people who will need it.
Ibrahim and Allen took that concept and then turned on its head the underlying assumption that trust is an important element in the pre-information-sharing relationship. Instead, their research shoes that sharing information helps build trust between unknown entities. Their research focused on a high-stakes fast-paced scenario (offshore oil crises), and found that trust could quickly be repaired or rebuilt by mutual sharing of information. This makes sense to me in many ways-- it's a show of good faith, for one-- and yet also seems radical and interesting.
This prevents situations like my classmate Lisa feeling left out of the conversation. It even has applications via social media technology, which can be used to transfer knowledge quickly and easily in a variety of channels (which I intend to explore more fully in my next post). And, in the case of Hurricane Rita, it prevents massive loss of life and property.
~*~
Readings discussed
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. doi:10.1002/asi.20640
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. doi:10.1002/asi.22676
Wang, W. T., & Lu, Y. C. (2010). Knowledge transfer in response to organizational crises: An exploratory study. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(5), 3934-3942. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.11.023
What I learned from these articles is that information sharing is incredibly important during crises; what differentiated the responses to hurricanes Katrina and Rita was the proper implementation of knowledge shared early in the preparations for the hurricanes. Wong and Lu took the same lesson to business organizations-- essentially, in order for any community, whether it is a company or an entire state, to survive any crisis, whether one of business or a cataclysmic event, it is necessary for people to transfer critical knowledge to the people who will need it.
Ibrahim and Allen took that concept and then turned on its head the underlying assumption that trust is an important element in the pre-information-sharing relationship. Instead, their research shoes that sharing information helps build trust between unknown entities. Their research focused on a high-stakes fast-paced scenario (offshore oil crises), and found that trust could quickly be repaired or rebuilt by mutual sharing of information. This makes sense to me in many ways-- it's a show of good faith, for one-- and yet also seems radical and interesting.
This prevents situations like my classmate Lisa feeling left out of the conversation. It even has applications via social media technology, which can be used to transfer knowledge quickly and easily in a variety of channels (which I intend to explore more fully in my next post). And, in the case of Hurricane Rita, it prevents massive loss of life and property.
~*~
Readings discussed
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. doi:10.1002/asi.20640
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. doi:10.1002/asi.22676
Wang, W. T., & Lu, Y. C. (2010). Knowledge transfer in response to organizational crises: An exploratory study. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(5), 3934-3942. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.11.023
Monday, February 10, 2014
Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration
As a jumping-off point for this round of investigation, I went in search my blogs by my classmates. In keeping with my fledgling investigations into knowledge flow through communities, I decided to use their idea to help inspire me in reading selection and topics of discussion for this post.
I began with this post by my classmate Whitney, which tackles a truly titanic amount of reading for one post. Her endorsement of the Hara book "Communities of Practice" told me that now was as good a time as ever for reading it, so before I discuss anything Whitney went into detail on, I'm going to stop and do Hara for a minute.
As Hara defines it, a "community of practice" is a collaborative but informal network that supports professional practitioners in their efforts to develop shared understandings and engage in work-relevant knowledge building. The idea of a shared understasnding is at the core of all the readings I've done on knowledge management thus far, as well as in several other courses I've taken in my LIS program. It is important in a particularly concrete way in terms of professionals in a shared field, because they must deal with knowledge in ways that are specific to their profession, which must make sense in their contexts to be usable, but may not apply outside their field. (This has come up in my catagloging class with the concept of the "shared vocabulary.")
Some of this shared understanding is serendipitous or inherent; these are people who already share a lot of thought processes and knowledge in common in order to work in their shared profession of choice. However, as no two brains work precisely the same, this still requires careful coordination to eliminate ambiguity and make communication as smooth as possible. This can even help with the transfer of invisible or tacit knowledge, as described by the lawyers who simply "know" what a judge's facial expressions mean for their clients and which jurors will be good choices for a jury.
This gave me an extra framework when discussing another of the pieces referred to by Whitney, the Grace article "Wikis as a knowledge management tool." While wikis are often thought of as decidedly unprofessional because they are tended to by the public rather than information professionals, they may very well be curated by the people who know most about the material. Wikis, collaboration, and the democracy and utility of public sharing have always been topics that are very interesting to me, and I was excited to read Grace's piece.
As Whitney said, Grace's piece is relatively straightforward and practical (although perhaps a bit technical for me close to the beginning). It discusses bringing wiki techology to professional systems to help organize knowledge efficiently between individuals and within systems, independent of formal training. This seems a natural extension of the community of practice into the digital sphere, and I am glad of it. While wikis present challenges-- without the authority of a formal trainer, control of the shared understanding becomes a bit shadier and more reliant on group policing-- I think it speaks to a concept brought up in one of the articles I discussed in my last post: that a decentralization of power is somewhat necessary for efficient information-sharing.
Now I get to feature another of my classmates, because I'll be referring to this post by Darra. (Is it recursive to refer to a post that refers back to my blog? Yes. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.) Darra also touches on Hara and group knowledge, and you should definitely go check it out. Particularly inspirational to me was the bit about a law degree being insufficient to practice law, and needing a community to be able to apply even the formal schooling, which really helped me contextualize Hara's points.
Darra's points on the Cook and Brown article "Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between oganizational knowledge and organizational knowing" are what I really want to get to. Darra reports having struggled with this reading (which is kind of a natural reaction to it), but she unpacks one of its ideas really beautifully and inspired me to pursue the thread myself.
Cook and Brown touch on an idea I've seen outlined as the difference between knowledge as data versus knowledge as process. They use different terms, referring instead to knowledge possessed by individuals and knowledge practiced by groups, but I think the concepts are related. Cook and Brown argue that what the typically think of as "knowledge" is the provision of the individual rather than groups, but that this is a limiting way of thinking. Knowledge as a possession of individuals isn't very useful in the context of this class, unless that individual chooses to share that information (say, on a wiki as discussed by Grace) and allow it to transmute itself into group practice. This would make it utile to a community of practitioners and subject to the kinds of forces described in Hara's book, which brings this blog post full circle and ties these concepts together far better than I would have hoped.
Onward and upwards!
~*~
Readings discussed:
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.
Cook, S. D. N., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.4.381
Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833
I began with this post by my classmate Whitney, which tackles a truly titanic amount of reading for one post. Her endorsement of the Hara book "Communities of Practice" told me that now was as good a time as ever for reading it, so before I discuss anything Whitney went into detail on, I'm going to stop and do Hara for a minute.
As Hara defines it, a "community of practice" is a collaborative but informal network that supports professional practitioners in their efforts to develop shared understandings and engage in work-relevant knowledge building. The idea of a shared understasnding is at the core of all the readings I've done on knowledge management thus far, as well as in several other courses I've taken in my LIS program. It is important in a particularly concrete way in terms of professionals in a shared field, because they must deal with knowledge in ways that are specific to their profession, which must make sense in their contexts to be usable, but may not apply outside their field. (This has come up in my catagloging class with the concept of the "shared vocabulary.")
Some of this shared understanding is serendipitous or inherent; these are people who already share a lot of thought processes and knowledge in common in order to work in their shared profession of choice. However, as no two brains work precisely the same, this still requires careful coordination to eliminate ambiguity and make communication as smooth as possible. This can even help with the transfer of invisible or tacit knowledge, as described by the lawyers who simply "know" what a judge's facial expressions mean for their clients and which jurors will be good choices for a jury.
This gave me an extra framework when discussing another of the pieces referred to by Whitney, the Grace article "Wikis as a knowledge management tool." While wikis are often thought of as decidedly unprofessional because they are tended to by the public rather than information professionals, they may very well be curated by the people who know most about the material. Wikis, collaboration, and the democracy and utility of public sharing have always been topics that are very interesting to me, and I was excited to read Grace's piece.
As Whitney said, Grace's piece is relatively straightforward and practical (although perhaps a bit technical for me close to the beginning). It discusses bringing wiki techology to professional systems to help organize knowledge efficiently between individuals and within systems, independent of formal training. This seems a natural extension of the community of practice into the digital sphere, and I am glad of it. While wikis present challenges-- without the authority of a formal trainer, control of the shared understanding becomes a bit shadier and more reliant on group policing-- I think it speaks to a concept brought up in one of the articles I discussed in my last post: that a decentralization of power is somewhat necessary for efficient information-sharing.
Now I get to feature another of my classmates, because I'll be referring to this post by Darra. (Is it recursive to refer to a post that refers back to my blog? Yes. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.) Darra also touches on Hara and group knowledge, and you should definitely go check it out. Particularly inspirational to me was the bit about a law degree being insufficient to practice law, and needing a community to be able to apply even the formal schooling, which really helped me contextualize Hara's points.
Darra's points on the Cook and Brown article "Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between oganizational knowledge and organizational knowing" are what I really want to get to. Darra reports having struggled with this reading (which is kind of a natural reaction to it), but she unpacks one of its ideas really beautifully and inspired me to pursue the thread myself.
Cook and Brown touch on an idea I've seen outlined as the difference between knowledge as data versus knowledge as process. They use different terms, referring instead to knowledge possessed by individuals and knowledge practiced by groups, but I think the concepts are related. Cook and Brown argue that what the typically think of as "knowledge" is the provision of the individual rather than groups, but that this is a limiting way of thinking. Knowledge as a possession of individuals isn't very useful in the context of this class, unless that individual chooses to share that information (say, on a wiki as discussed by Grace) and allow it to transmute itself into group practice. This would make it utile to a community of practitioners and subject to the kinds of forces described in Hara's book, which brings this blog post full circle and ties these concepts together far better than I would have hoped.
Onward and upwards!
~*~
Readings discussed:
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.
Cook, S. D. N., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.4.381
Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Lost direction
I had been trying to write this post for several days without success before I finally got started . It seems that without a clearly-organized reading schedule or prompts I become timid about finding new topics to explore. For the last post, I had a jumping-off point (Polanyi) and I used it to pick two other articles I could tell based on their titles dealt with similar ideas. For this one, I dillied over the reading list, but when making an informed decision began to seem impossible, I bit the bullet and selected three of the articles more or less at random for this post. So this is an explorative adventure for all of us, and not just for you (readers). We'll see how it goes.
The first piece I chose to read, "The Once and Future Information Society," provided an interesting framework for my consideration of future readings and concepts, so it worked out a bit serendipitously that I chose to tackle it so close to the beginning of this project. Its authors (Rule and Besen) posit that a concept exists amongst intellectuals that information and its methods of being shared have (are? will?) changed (changing? change?) social history. While there is no doubt that the ways in which society handles and accesses information (and the kinds of information to which society has access), Rule and Besen question the assumption that this is drastically overhauling society-- in terms of economy, politics, and all.
The "information society" described in the article is a flattering but somewhat nebulous concept. The changes attributed to it by information theorists are bold and somewhat spurious (particularly the Drucker assumption, originally published in 1968 and allegedly reiterated by subsequent authors on the subject, that our society is "post-capitalist"-- maybe my view is skewed by the SuperBowl advertisements, but I think I would have to squint pretty hard to lose sight of capitalism's supposedly invisible hand in our culture). My take on this concept links nicely to the central argument described by Daneshgar and Parirokh and explained in this blog post by my professor Dr. Burns-- knowledge is a commodity. While capitalism may look different now than it did before the advent of technology changed the ways in which we engage with information, by now even information has been incorporated into the capitalist framework. We trade in it as easily as we trade in more traditional forms of currency, and many see an exchange rate between the two. (Saint Simon and other information theorists, as detailed by Rule and Besen, consider it a focal point of information society that information has increased economic value, calling into question exactly what Drucker may have meant by his curious phrasing.)
The first piece I chose to read, "The Once and Future Information Society," provided an interesting framework for my consideration of future readings and concepts, so it worked out a bit serendipitously that I chose to tackle it so close to the beginning of this project. Its authors (Rule and Besen) posit that a concept exists amongst intellectuals that information and its methods of being shared have (are? will?) changed (changing? change?) social history. While there is no doubt that the ways in which society handles and accesses information (and the kinds of information to which society has access), Rule and Besen question the assumption that this is drastically overhauling society-- in terms of economy, politics, and all.
The "information society" described in the article is a flattering but somewhat nebulous concept. The changes attributed to it by information theorists are bold and somewhat spurious (particularly the Drucker assumption, originally published in 1968 and allegedly reiterated by subsequent authors on the subject, that our society is "post-capitalist"-- maybe my view is skewed by the SuperBowl advertisements, but I think I would have to squint pretty hard to lose sight of capitalism's supposedly invisible hand in our culture). My take on this concept links nicely to the central argument described by Daneshgar and Parirokh and explained in this blog post by my professor Dr. Burns-- knowledge is a commodity. While capitalism may look different now than it did before the advent of technology changed the ways in which we engage with information, by now even information has been incorporated into the capitalist framework. We trade in it as easily as we trade in more traditional forms of currency, and many see an exchange rate between the two. (Saint Simon and other information theorists, as detailed by Rule and Besen, consider it a focal point of information society that information has increased economic value, calling into question exactly what Drucker may have meant by his curious phrasing.)
Because of the vagueness of the definitions of the terms involved, it's difficult to estimate the exact effects this has had on the economy and society as a whole. Rule and Besen point to outlandish optimism and egoism on the part of intellectuals who have asserted that the "information society" has had a large and lasting effect. One interesting part of the debate is whether we ought to classify "theoretical knowledge" separately from "practical knowledge," but this gets messy when the distinction between the two breaks down, as it does each time a new stride forward is taken and more and more theoretical knowledge becomes practically applicable.
The takeways from this piece are that 1) education is important for the possibility of success in this age, but 2) it is still no guarantee thereof, particularly in cases where a system is already in place. Individuals have a greater chance of socioeconomic advancement with access to information, but information does not necessarily assist the masses in their struggle toward social justice. Information has been weaponized with the advent of expert witnesses, and there are in some ways more traps to fall into than ever. The idyllic "information society" playfully referenced in the title is not all it's cracked up to be-- and the article cautions against investing in its fantasy.
The next reading I chose was Duguid and Brown's "Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation." This article examines the ways information moves through organizations. Duguid and Brown look, instead of vaguely-defined "society," at organizations, which are thought of as more mechanical and precise. I see a connection to the Rule and Besen piece discussed above-- serendipity, again-- because one of the main points this article makes is that excellent and potentially very useful information can come to light through work, but if it originates in the wrong part of the system, it may never be shared equitably and help the betterment of the entire organization. This sounds a lot like Rule and Besen's cautioning against overoptimism on the part of intellectuals who favor the term "information society."
Unlike Rule and Besen, who simply wished to point out the pitfalls of a way of thinking, Duguid and Brown provide a solution to this problem. They say that in order for organizations to best utilize the information provided by their members, they need to first acknowledge those members as individuals capable of innovative thought. This will allow organizations to reevaluate their standard practices and help allow for creative problem-solving rather than rote sticking to a formula provided by the organization.
The final piece I am looking at this week is Frank Blackler's "Knowledge, Knowledge Work, and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation." The theorists Blackler reviews seem to call back to the material I engaged with last week, about knowledge and what it is. Again the answer is indefinable and, the article suggests, attempts to define it restrict it too much to make it useful. Knowledge lives in the dynamic space between people and their communities, and we have not yet invented a way to talk about it concretely. It changes constantly and cannot be pinned down.
Then, however, Blackler diverts to a course that runs closely to the Rule and Besen piece. This is to discuss "knowledge work," which is a way of talking about the commodification of knowledge and the ways knowledge fits into the capitalist infrastructure. Blackler contends that the central issue in knowledge work is how to respond to the changes in information systems (in both structure and action). The ways in which organizations interact with information are changing, and the ways they weather those changes are going to dictate how successful they are in this informational-capitalist economy.
~*~
Readings discussed:
Rule, J. B., & Besen, Yasemin. (2008). The once and future information society. Theory and Society, 37(4), 317-342. doi:10.1007/s11186-007-9049-6
Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (1991). Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation. Organization Science, 2(1), 40-57. doi:10.1287/orsc.2.1.40
Blackler, F. (1995). Knowledge, knowledge work and organizations: An overview and interpretation. Organization Studies, 16(6), 1021-1046. doi:10.1177/017084069501600605
Thursday, January 23, 2014
The Ineffability of Knowledge
I'd like to begin this blog with a discussion of knowledge: what it is, how we deal with it, and what this implies for managing a collection of artifacts.
Michael Polanyi's book The Tacit Dimension really spoke to a concept I've thought about off and on for several years-- he phrases it as "we know more than we can tell" on page 4 of his book (a description which is reiterated throughout the text). It's a difficult concept to illustrate-- by its very nature, no doubt, as the things we know but cannot tell by definition cannot be trotted out as evidence. Polanyi provides several excellent examples in his text but I would like to provide one of my favorites from the beginning of my consideration of this question before I move on to the concept of "tacit knowledge" as it is discussed in other texts.
Psychology has long held the idea that people are very good at "reading" each other-- whether someone means us harm or is lying is something most of us have some level of intuition for (and scientific study bears out that we often know more than we think we do, as long as we don't overanalyze our gut reactions). However, we find ourselves at a loss to explain how we come to these conclusions. In the absence of a cartoonish tell like a small child or a poker player in a movie, the signs are subtle and, individually, often escape our notice. We put our knowledge that we are being deceived or that someone is up to no good down to a feeling, because it is indescribable in logical terms. We don't know how or why we know this, but somehow that information was conveyed. And we would be at a complete loss to tell someone else how we figured it out (unless we are Sherlock Holmes or a trained behavior specialist).
Cowan et al (2000) address the (then) nearly 50-year-old concept of "tacit knowledge" as a "loaded buzzword." By then, "tacit" knowledge had come to be antonymous with "codified" knowledge-- knowledge which has been cataloged, broken down, organized, and tagged for easier location, consumption, and use.
Chris Kimble's 2013 article "Knowledge management, codification,and tacit knowledge" puts forward several definitions of knowledge, but my favorite is this, on the difference between "information" and "knowledge"-- information exists without association and means nothing on its own. To become knowledge, it must be interacted with by people, put into context, and interpreted. (I put this down to the first syllable of "knowledge" being "know"-- without someone who knows it, information does not become knowledge.) That makes knowledge more interactive and reliant on critical thinking skills than the way it is often used colloquially, but I find this a necessary corollary to move forward.
Kimble also stipulates that some knowledge is transferable ("both an input and an output"), which I would certainly like to believe, or what is the point of what we (teachers, librarians, researchers, humans) do? However, it may or may not be "true" or "real" in a traditional sense, as much of what we would consider "knowledge" is the result of social constructs. This does not make it more or less exchangeable or even personally useful, but it may make it more difficult to properly contextualize and in particular more difficult to remove from context. (Confused yet?)
So: we can understand knowledge, but we may or may not be able to communicate it or even describe it to ourselves. What does this mean for organizing information?
The organization of information is a huge part of the library field. Sanford Berman, one of the first catalogers, called any collection of information which is not cataloged so as to be easily accessible to users "bibliocide." As addressed above, information can only become knowledge if it is reachable by people. But how can we catalog something we can't describe? If we don't know what it is and can't convey it, how can we tag it and relate it to others?
Kimble mentions several very important benefits of codification (which mostly, to me, boil down to how much easier and less reliant on luck the sharing of information becomes when it is codified). The costs of codification Kimble lists (Cowan et al address them too) are a little less obvious, but particularly relevant in the case of tacit knowledge-- the creation and translation of a codebook for organizing knowledge can be subjective and intensive. This limits the applicability of the otherwise very useful field of cataloging, especially when it comes to the intangibles involves in "knowledge." Managing this can be complicated, but I have to believe it is worth it to fight through the dense thicket of ineffability to catalog knowledge.
At core, that's one of the things librarians are: explorers, shining light into the dark caves of unexplored data to uncover helpful knowledge.
I like that fantasy. I hope you do too.
~*~
Readings dicussed:
Cowan, R., David, P. A., & Foray, D. (2000). The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness. Industrial & Corporate Change, 9(2), 211-253.
Kimble, C. (2013). Knowledge management, codification and tacit knowledge. Information Research, 18(2).
Polanyi, Michael. (2009). The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1966)
Michael Polanyi's book The Tacit Dimension really spoke to a concept I've thought about off and on for several years-- he phrases it as "we know more than we can tell" on page 4 of his book (a description which is reiterated throughout the text). It's a difficult concept to illustrate-- by its very nature, no doubt, as the things we know but cannot tell by definition cannot be trotted out as evidence. Polanyi provides several excellent examples in his text but I would like to provide one of my favorites from the beginning of my consideration of this question before I move on to the concept of "tacit knowledge" as it is discussed in other texts.
Psychology has long held the idea that people are very good at "reading" each other-- whether someone means us harm or is lying is something most of us have some level of intuition for (and scientific study bears out that we often know more than we think we do, as long as we don't overanalyze our gut reactions). However, we find ourselves at a loss to explain how we come to these conclusions. In the absence of a cartoonish tell like a small child or a poker player in a movie, the signs are subtle and, individually, often escape our notice. We put our knowledge that we are being deceived or that someone is up to no good down to a feeling, because it is indescribable in logical terms. We don't know how or why we know this, but somehow that information was conveyed. And we would be at a complete loss to tell someone else how we figured it out (unless we are Sherlock Holmes or a trained behavior specialist).
Cowan et al (2000) address the (then) nearly 50-year-old concept of "tacit knowledge" as a "loaded buzzword." By then, "tacit" knowledge had come to be antonymous with "codified" knowledge-- knowledge which has been cataloged, broken down, organized, and tagged for easier location, consumption, and use.
Chris Kimble's 2013 article "Knowledge management, codification,and tacit knowledge" puts forward several definitions of knowledge, but my favorite is this, on the difference between "information" and "knowledge"-- information exists without association and means nothing on its own. To become knowledge, it must be interacted with by people, put into context, and interpreted. (I put this down to the first syllable of "knowledge" being "know"-- without someone who knows it, information does not become knowledge.) That makes knowledge more interactive and reliant on critical thinking skills than the way it is often used colloquially, but I find this a necessary corollary to move forward.
Kimble also stipulates that some knowledge is transferable ("both an input and an output"), which I would certainly like to believe, or what is the point of what we (teachers, librarians, researchers, humans) do? However, it may or may not be "true" or "real" in a traditional sense, as much of what we would consider "knowledge" is the result of social constructs. This does not make it more or less exchangeable or even personally useful, but it may make it more difficult to properly contextualize and in particular more difficult to remove from context. (Confused yet?)
So: we can understand knowledge, but we may or may not be able to communicate it or even describe it to ourselves. What does this mean for organizing information?
The organization of information is a huge part of the library field. Sanford Berman, one of the first catalogers, called any collection of information which is not cataloged so as to be easily accessible to users "bibliocide." As addressed above, information can only become knowledge if it is reachable by people. But how can we catalog something we can't describe? If we don't know what it is and can't convey it, how can we tag it and relate it to others?
Kimble mentions several very important benefits of codification (which mostly, to me, boil down to how much easier and less reliant on luck the sharing of information becomes when it is codified). The costs of codification Kimble lists (Cowan et al address them too) are a little less obvious, but particularly relevant in the case of tacit knowledge-- the creation and translation of a codebook for organizing knowledge can be subjective and intensive. This limits the applicability of the otherwise very useful field of cataloging, especially when it comes to the intangibles involves in "knowledge." Managing this can be complicated, but I have to believe it is worth it to fight through the dense thicket of ineffability to catalog knowledge.
At core, that's one of the things librarians are: explorers, shining light into the dark caves of unexplored data to uncover helpful knowledge.
I like that fantasy. I hope you do too.
~*~
Readings dicussed:
Cowan, R., David, P. A., & Foray, D. (2000). The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness. Industrial & Corporate Change, 9(2), 211-253.
Kimble, C. (2013). Knowledge management, codification and tacit knowledge. Information Research, 18(2).
Polanyi, Michael. (2009). The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1966)
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