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