...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
I haven't read the article you reference about the rural IT firm using technology to bridge distances, however it reminded me of something I saw last night on Facebook. There's a wedding planning service here in Davenport, Iowa that also has branches in Brazil and Germany. I thought this was odd considering it seemed to be a small business, not some large corporation that can operate overseas. But as you point out, technology is making things like this possible.
ReplyDeleteThinking about how trust is built by sharing knowledge, that makes perfect sense in information capitalism. Primates build trust by sharing resources. Information and knowledge are now the primary resources available. I don't think I would've connected those dots had you not phrased it just as you did :) Although I have to admit, I took a more cynical read of the Goggins & Mascaro piece, perhaps because I read it in the context of the Stock piece on informational cities (or perhaps because of my native cynicism) - instead of "Yay, ICT" I read "Here's all these ways rural folks are still vulnerable to distance despite ICT"
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