Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Environments

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Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Environments

• From a cross-cultural perspective
• provided by you, the audience

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Contents

• Knowledge Management/Sharing
• Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Environments
• Virtual Teams
• Communities of Practice
• Research Communities

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What is Knowledge Management (KM)

• Broad KM is the systematic and explicit
  management of knowledge related activities,
  practices, programs and policies within the
  enterprise (Wiig, 2001, p. 6), or
• Knowledge management is the process by which the
  organization generates wealth from its knowledge
  or intellectual capital (Bukowitz Williams,
  2000), or..
• In June 1995, a health worker in Kamana, Zambia,
  logged on to the CDC Web site in Atlanta and got
  the answer to a question on how to treat Malaria
  (Denning, 2001), or,.

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and a virtual ad hoc, one-off, emergency response
team

• A New Zealand company with international offices
  had a one-month deadline to supply a South-east
  Asian government ministry with a strategic
  business plan. The project leader in Wellington
  accessed company expertise in New Zealand,
  Australia and on location in Asia and was able to
  complete the project on time. She said
• While it is good to have people by your side,
  if we had tried to get all these people up to
  Asia, we probably would never have met the
  deadline.

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Davenport and Prusak, in Working Knowledge (1997)
define knowledge as

• a fluid mix of framed experience, values,
  contextual information, and expert insight that
  provides a framework for evaluating and
  incorporating new experiences and information

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What is Knowledge from a Chinese Perspective?

• the Chinese philosopher Fung Yu-Lan stated
• "Epistemology has never developed in Chinese
  philosophy. Whether the table that I see before
  me is real or illusory, and whether it is only a
  idea in my mind or is occupying objective space,
  was never seriously considered by Chinese
  philosophers. No such epistemological problems
  are to be found in Chinese philosophy (save in
  Buddhism, which came from India), since
  epistemological problems arise only when a
  demarcation between the subject and the object is
  emphasized. And in the aesthetic continuum,
  there is no such demarcation. In it the knower
  and the known is one whole. ref Yu-Lan, F.
  (1948). A short history of Chinese philosophy A
  Systematic account of Chinese thought from its
  origins to present day.

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History of KM

• KM has been an important matter from the
  beginning even one of life and death
• Then a religious and philosophical matter
• Then an economic matter, e.g.Crafts Guilds
• No overarching theory of KM, yet.
• KM is rooted in a variety of disciplines

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Recent KM Roots

• Organizational Management
• Rationalization of work - Taylorism, TQM
• The importance of information and explicit
  knowledge as organizational resources Drucker
• The cultural dimension of KM the learning
  organization Senge
• Innovation diffusion and information and
  technology transfer

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Information and Communications Technology (ICT)

• Dealing with exponential increases in the amount
  of available knowledge and increasingly complex
  products and processes
• Early groupware and hypertext applications
  Engelbart, 1978 McCraken
• Artificial Intelligence and expert systems
• CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work),
  Decision Support Systems, Workflow, Document
  Management, Relational and object databases
• Records Management

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Other

• Psychology
• The role of knowledge in behavior
• Library and information science
• Cognitive sciences
• How we learn and know to improve tools and
  techniques for gathering and transferring
  knowledge
• Economics
• Social Sciences

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• 1980s Knowledge Management enters business
  vocabulary
• To provide a technological base, the Initiative
  for Managing Knowledge Assets was started in 1989
• KM articles begin appearing in journals
• 1990s
• Management consulting companies begin in-house
  knowledge management training programs
• 1991 Brainpower article in Fortune magazine
• 1995 - The Knowledge-Creating Company How
  Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of
  Innovation (1995), Ikujiro Nonaka Hirotaka
  Takeuchi
• By mid-90s KM initiatives are flourishing
  OECD, World Bank, etc
• Became a big business for the likes of Ernst
  Young, Arthur Anderson, Booz-Allen Hamilton

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Driving Forces

• Competitive environment/knowledge economy
• Knowledge is often the only advantage
• Globalization
• Technology
• Information management
• communications
• The knowledge worker
• Changing/mobile workplace

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Status

• Categorization of KM Approaches (Sveiby)
• Management of Information
• Knowledge objects and can be handled by
  information management systems
• Management of People
• Knowledge processes, a complex set of dynamic
  skills, know-how, etc that is constantly
  changing.

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Issues

• No shortage of issues
• defining KM and related issues
• determining organizational needs
• getting people onside
• selecting and implementing strategies
• human resource issues
• selecting and implementing technologies
• measuring success (ROI)

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KM Strategy

• Knowledge has become the key economic resource
  and dominant and perhaps even the only source
  of competitive advantage
• Peter Drucker
• Managing in a time of great change
• (1995, p.90)

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Motivation for KM

• Knowledge confers the ability to attain business
  goals
• Knowledge is the only truly sustainable personal
  and organizational advantage
• The knowledge worker
• The most expensive resource is knowledgeable
  staff
• Technology
• Information management
• communications

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Three Levels of KM and Appropriate Technologies
(Allee, 2000)

• What?
• Operational
• Connecting knowledge to people who need it
• How?
• Tactical
• Connecting people to each other
• Why?
• Strategic
• Connecting knowledge to the business model

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Operational KMConnecting knowledge to those who
need it

• How can we codify knowledge and share routine
  tasks?
• e-learning tools
• workflow software
• knowledge repositories
• best practice databases
• knowledge engineering
• imaging technologies
• search engines
• newsfeeds
• What else?

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Usefulness of Knowledge Automation
Technology advances help movemore complex work
to routine
Databases Job Aids Training IT Tools
Allee, 2000
Frequency of Work
Routine
Logical Variations
Unusual Variations
NonRoutine
New Innovation
Ack Karl Wiig
Complexity of Work
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Tactical KM Connecting people to each other

• How can we better create, share and apply our
  knowledge?
• Communities of practice
• collaborative tools
• after action reviews
• knowledge mapping
• video-conferencing
• project histories
• personalization tools
• social network analysis
• virtual team tools
• group processes

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Usefulness of Knowledge Automation
Technology advances help movemore complex work
to routine
Databases Job Aids Training IT Tools
Allee, 2000
Frequency of Work
Routine
Logical Variations
Unusual Variations
NonRoutine
New Innovation
Ack Karl Wiig
Complexity of Work
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Strategic KM Connecting knowledge to the
business model

• How do we create business value?
• Scorecards, business modeling
• New modeling tools
• Systems mapping
• Scenario building
• Network ethics
• Collaborative cultures
• Non-financial reporting
• Partnering agreements
• Dialogue
• Open exchange

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Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Environments
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Virtual Teams

• Cyber teams
• E-teams
• Distributed teams

• (Temporary), culturally diverse, geographically
  dispersed, electronically communicating
  workgroups.
• Business
• Research
• Education
• Government
• NGOs

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A Virtual Scenario available now
London
New York
Wellington
Rio
Tokyo
Shared document, video and audio link, and
database
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Factors driving virtual teams

• Organizational structure changing to meet the
  demands of the fast-paced, dynamic global economy
  
• Many organizations are moving from a
  systems-based organizational model to a
  collaborative, networked organizational model.

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• Practitioner-based literature on organizational
  virtual teams began in 1994 (OHara-Devereaux
  Johansen (1994), Grenier Metes (1995), Lipnack
  Stamps (1997) .
• Academic studies on students date from about
  1997-98. (e.g., Cramton, 2001, Jarvenpaa, Knoll
  Leidner, 1998), Kayworth Leidner, 2000 Lau
  Sarker Sahay, 2000),
• Published empirical research on organizational
  virtual teams began appearing in (in earnest) in
  1999-2000 Jackson, 1999 Vickery, Clark,
  Carlson, 1999), (Nandhakumar, 1999), (Maznevski
  Chudoba, 2000 .
• Quite a popular subject now

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Research Areas

• Team Issues Issues of trust (Jarvenpaa et al,
  1998 Nandhakumar, 1999 Attribution bias
  (Cramton, 2001) Collaborative processes (Cramton
  Webber, 2000 Sahay et al 1999) Communication
  (Tan et al, 2000 Warkenten Beranek,
  1999).Virtual team dynamics and effectiveness
  (Maznevski Chudoba, 2000 Leadership (Kayworth
  Leidner, 2002)
• Organizational aspects of virtual teams (Jackson,
  1999 Vickery, Clark, Carlson, 1999)
• Boundary Issues Time, Distance, Organizational,
  Culture, etc Espinosa et al., 2002 OLeary
  Cummings, 2002 Montoya-Weiss et al., 2001
• Knowledge Management Situated learning in virtual
  teams (Robey, Khoo Poers, 2000) Information
  Sharing in virtual teams (Crampton Orvis, 2001)
  Situated Knowledge and Learning (Sole
  Edmondson, 2002) Creation of Intellectual Capital
  (Majchrzak et al., 2002)
• The Use of ICT Communication channels in building
  virtual relationships (Pauleen Yoong, 2001).
• Theory-based studies Adaptive Structuration
  (Majchrzak et al., 2000)

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What has the research looked at?

• Creating social interaction, building trust,
  aligning and maintaining motivation
• sharing tacit knowledge to maintain common
  understanding
• choosing appropriate team management structures
• making team member expectations explicit
• Effective use of ICT

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Communities of practice

• Groups of people informally bound together by
  shared expertise and passion for a joint
  enterprise.
• Knowledge is not some substance that can be
  managed from a distance like an inventory. It is
  part of the shared practice of communities that
  need it, create it, use it, debate it, distribute
  it, adapt it, and transform it. (Despres
  Chauvel, p. 206)

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Characteristics of Communities of Practice

• Members choose to belong because they
• Enjoy knowing each other
• Find each other interesting
• Respect each others perspectives

Peers in the execution of real work. What holds
them together is a common sense of purpose
andreal need to knowwhat each other knows. -
John Seely Brown, VP and Chief Scientist,Xerox
Corp
Verna Allee
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3 Important Dimensions

• Domain
• A domain of common knowledgegives people a sense
  of jointenterprise that emerges fromtheir
  shared understanding.

• Community
• They function as a community through
  relationships of mutual engagement that build
  relationship and trust.

• Practice
• They build capacity by building a shared
  repertoire of resources, tools, and artifacts
  that support future learning.

Verna Allee
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Communities of practice

• are self-organising systems
• cannot be started arbitrarily
• thrive under the right conditions

As communities of practice generate knowledge,
they renew themselves. They give you both the
golden eggs and the goose that lays them (Wenger
and Snyder, 2001, p. 9)
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Nurturing communities of practice requires paying
attention to

• Knowledge strategy
• Organisational orientation
• Organisational systems
• Organisational resources

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Communities of practice add value to
organisations by

• Helping drive strategy
• Starting new lines of business
• Solving problems quickly
• Transferring best practice
• Developing professional skills
• Helping recruit and train new talent

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Virtual Research Communities

• Geographically distributed, work across time,
  dynamic, etc.
• Benefits (Lewis, 1998)
• Reduction in costs and risks
• Access to expertise and knowledge especially
  tacit knowledge
• Personal motivations
• Enter new areas, be part of something bigger than
  otherwise possible

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ICT- The driving factor in Virtual KS

• ICT links people across functions, divisions, and
  organizations, as well as distance, time and
  culture.
• ICT supports the use of virtual teams, CoPs and
  research communities

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ICT Task /Communication-Mode Matrix
Types of Tasks
Communication Mode
Negotiating complex sits
Gen ideas/coll data
Routine Problems
Complex Problems
Audio
Poor fit
Good fit
Marginal fit
Good fit
Marginal fit
Marginal fit
Poor fit
Good fit
Video
Data only
Good fit
Marginal fit
Poor fit
Poor fit
F2F Marginal fit Marginal fit Good
fit Good fit
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Any-time Any-Place Matrix (Johansen, 1991)
E-mail, Voice Mail, Usenet, Fax, Computer
conferencing
Application Sharing, Audio and Video
conferencing,
Different Time Different Place
Same Time Different Place
Electronic Whiteboards, Electronic Meeting Rooms,
Voting Tools
Desktop computers, Blackboards, Group rooms
Same Time Same Place
Different Time Same Place
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Sharing and Distributing Knowledge Key Questions

• Who needs to know?
• What do they need to know?
• How much do they need to know?
• How can we facilitate that?
• How to share across cultures?

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In Teams

• How to deal with issues? From a practitioner
  perspective
• How to research these issues? From a researcher
  perspective
• How to set up collaborative virtual research?

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Four Premises

• The most valuable knowledge is tacit
• Show me and explain it to me are the best
  ways to share knowledge
• Its not always in a persons best interest to
  share knowledge
• Organizations do not support this kind of sharing

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The Challenges to Creating Successful Virtual
knowledge Sharing Communities

• Creating social interaction, building trust.
  Aligning and maintaining motivation
• Sharing tacit knowledge to maintain common
  understanding
• Choosing appropriate group management structures
• Making community and member expectations explicit

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World Bank

• Case study

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Knowledge Sharing at the World Bank
Present
Past
Knowledge
Help
manager
desk
What the client also needs .....
Briefing
Relevant polices, guidelines, procedures
Relevant bibliographyreference materials
Most frequently asked questions
materials
Relevant best practice
Country conditions, correspondence personae,
issues
Best analytical tools, e.g. economic, financial
analyses
Relevant
knowledge is
made available
just-in-time
Text of previous similar task outputs
Most knowledgeable gurus on key issues
Relevant country, sector data
Most frequently made mistakes in the past
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Knowledge Sharing Organization
Task Teams and Thematic Groups
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Knowledge Sharing Network Activities

• Thematic Groups (communities of practice)
• Advisory Services (help desk facilities)
• Sector Knowledge Collections (Web)
• Sector Statistics and Indicators
• Project Databases - Directories of Expertise
• Knowledge Packs (synthesis of experience)
• Dissemination (formal/informal learning)

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Knowledge Sharing Practice
University of Toronto
Retired
ECA Region
MNA Region
DEC
Indonesiafield office
Tax policy and administration Thematic Group
Public expenditure review Mission Madagascar