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.
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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.
While reading Trkman and Desouza, I couldn't help but focus on knowledge risks at the individual level. The authors stress the importance of individuals in sharing knowledge between companies and even within companies. It's a careful game as to how much or how little or what an individual can share not only in respect to the needs of their company but also recognizing that knowledge sharing or withholding reflects on them as professional individuals.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of something I saw on last week's episode of Suits! A character had devised an algorithm which was hugely helpful in his line of work, but because he had developed it (over ten years or so) while under contract, he could not share I with any other potential employers. Although it was his knowledge, he did not have legal ownership of it and could not share it elsewhere without incurring massive harm on himself.
DeleteI just finished the KO article as well and I’m on the fence about outsourcing. There are obvious pros and cons for both sides, though ultimately I guess it is necessary in some situations. For this example though as far as coursework it seems that should be a responsibility of the professors. Unless this is an extremely inexpensive program it seems the bulk of what a student is getting from a program is the coursework, and outsourcing it makes most of the university unnecessary. Other than grading, what would you even need professors for? Also, FU is an unfortunate name for a university.
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