University of Washington Information School

What shapes employees’ decisions to share knowledge in real work practices: An exploration of knowledge sharing processes and factors shaping workers’ knowledge sharing when performing a task

Abstract:

Knowledge is one of the most important competitive resources a business can have. This has been repetitively emphasized ...in the literatures. A recurring finding is that in order to effectively maintain this advantage for long term development and survival, an organization must rely on its employees, the real creators and users, to effectively share knowledge and thereby enhance the collective innovative capability of the organization. How to motivate employees to share knowledge, whether called information, expertise or experience, therefore, becomes a vital component of organizational knowledge management initiatives.

Integrating Structuration theory, social motivation theory, commitment to social foci theory, this proposed study focuses on investigating: “What shapes employees’ decisions to share knowledge in real work practices?”. Taking a grounded approach and building on results from business process analysis, this research sheds light on the theoretical development of knowledge sharing as a process. Extracting key workflows, business processes and task performance routines utility workers are interacting with on a daily basis, this study is able to develop a model of knowledge sharing integrating key dimension of the process as well as crucial factors shaping employees’ knowledge sharing decisions. Systematic investigation of interactions among workers’ daily practices, organizational motivational interventions such as technological implementation and changes, training, business process design, work scheduling and performance evaluation, and management’ practices offers a valuable opportunity for understanding knowledge sharing processes comprehensively.

Qualitative approaches through documentation reviews, in-depth interviews (42), and on-site observations (42) are taken in empirical investigations. Findings suggest that organizational knowledge sharing process is an iterative and dynamic process. During this process, interactions among workflows, business processes, organizational interventions such as training, formal role definitions and performance review, and individual sharing practices in daily task performance constantly shape as well as being shaped by individuals’ knowledge sharing decisions. During this process, data and information related to organizational knowledge was collected, analyzed, used, disseminated, tested, feedback initiated and collected, reviewed, reanalyzed, and reused, before a shared understandings of workflows, business processes and task performance was generated and shared via new workflows, business processes and individuals’ new sharing practices.

Investigations of disruptions between what organizations are designed to achieve and what is actually functioning provide us an opportunity to look at motivations and commitment to knowledge sharing practices. A comparison between what is currently captured by the system and what is embedded in knowledge sharing process points out the disadvantages of using information systems as main knowledge accumulation tools for long term development.

This study contributes to the current discussion of the process view of knowledge sharing. Furthermore, since findings of this research are grounded in real government field work operations, emergency response and daily business practices, it can offer insightful guidelines for mobile system design, government emergency response practices and business process redesign. Read More

Revisiting and building upon a previous iSchool Research Conversation, which occurred on November 21^st , 2008, Jentery Sayers (PhD Candidate, UW English) and Matthew Wilson (PhD Candidate, Geography) will be facilitating a discussion on the role of “mapping” (broadly understood) in the digital humanities, particularly... digital humanities pedagogy.

Specifically, Sayers and Wilson are motivated by the following question:
How might digital humanities curricula synthesize the acquisition of technical skills with critical practices? Beginning with a brief overview of their 2008-09 Huckabay Teaching project, Sayers and Wilson will provide an update on the progress of their curriculum, a brief assessment of the technology-focused learning it has fostered (in and out of the classroom), and an outline of the issues they have faced since November’s conversation. They will then move to explain what the concept of mapping affords undergraduate research and humanities curricula. These affordances include the iterative development of digital humanities projects, the use of boundary objects as tools for circulating work and collaborating, and the “distant reading” of historical, literary, and cultural texts. If possible, their brief introduction to the curriculum will include short presentations by students in Sayers’s “Mapping the Digital Humanities” CHID 498 course.

<Bios>
JENTERY SAYERS is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English and teaches computer-integrated courses situated in the digital humanities and science and technology studies. As the recipient of the
2008 Kairos Computers and Writing Teaching Award, as well as a 2009 UW Science Studies Network Fellow, a 2008-09 HASTAC Scholar, and 2008-09 Huckabay UW Teaching Fellow, Sayers is invested not only in historicizing technology in particular cultural contexts, but also exploring the ways that it can be mobilized through creative, critical, and collaborative projects. His dissertation attends to how technology is culturally embedded in 19th and 20th century Anglo-American literature, with particular emphasis on sound technologies and their relation to print. This spring quarter, he is teaching Comparative History of Ideas 498, "Mapping the Digital Humanities," which is the subject of this conversation.

MATTHEW WILSON is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. His research is situated across the disciplines of political geography, science studies, and technoculture studies, particularly as these interface with a more specific field called 'critical geographic information systems'. He is interested in how geographic information technologies enable particular neighborhood assessment endeavors, and how these kinds of geocoding activities mobilize notions of 'quality-of-life' and 'sustainability'.
His dissertation research concentrates at the intersections of several phenomena, namely the energies with which nonprofit and community organizations approach neighborhood quality-of-life issues, the increased role that geographic information technologies have in addressing this kind of indicator work, as well as the increased geocoding of city spaces more generally. As an instructor with the UW Extension GIS Certificate program, he lectures on principles of cartography and cartographic critique. He also serves as the editorial assistant for a journal, Social & Cultural Geography. Read More

This dissertation proposes and explicates the concept of an oral document as a way to ground an exploratory discussion on orality and information behavior. This study isolates and focuses on information conveyed orally. A review of information behavior and allied literatures is used to explain what orality is and why i...t is important to information science. The meta-theory of social constructionism is used as a framework for defining and exploring the concept of an oral document. The concept of context additionally informs this effort. A field study methodology is used to gather observational data that demonstrate how utterances fit the definition articulated for a document and incorporate properties of a document. Data analysis results in expanding the initial description of the concept under investigation. Results determine that the conceptualization of an oral document introduced is consistent with the concept of document and provides information researchers with extended capabilities for the study and analysis of information and knowledge that is created and conveyed orally. The dissertation provides recommendations for theory, practice, and future research.Read More

Dr. Buchanan will be presenting the results of her recent NSF-funded work on internet research ethics. As an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she researches and teaches in the areas of information and research ethics. Dr. Buchanan is the current Chair of the Association of Internet Research...ers Ethics Working Group, Co-Director of the International Society of Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT) and Chair of the Wisconsin Library Association Intellectual Freedom Round Table. She and Professor Charles Ess founded and edit the new International Journal of Internet Research Ethics.

For more information on Dr. Elizabeth Buchanan, please visit, http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/SOIS/cipr/director.html Read More

Under the aegis of two of her research projects, InterPARES and the Digital Records Forensics (DRF) project, Prof Duranti will demonstrate how information technologies have made it difficult to identify and establish the trustworthiness of records in various digital environments, and have added a level of complexity to... the concept of record itself such that the legal system has serious problems in assessing digital documentary evidence.

Prof Duranti will begin her talk with a discussion of the concept of record as understood in traditional diplomatics and archival science, and then demonstrate its application to static and dynamic entities in digital systems by looking at selected InterPARES case studies. Finally she will discuss some of the legal consequences of the InterPARES project research findings and the way they are addressed by the Digital Records Forensics (DRF) project, for example, with regard to the hearsay rules.

<Bio>
Luciana Duranti is Chair of the Master of Archival Studies at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies of the University of British Columbia, and a Professor of archival theory, diplomatics, and the management of digital records in both its master’s and doctoral archival programs. Professor Duranti holds a Doctorate in Arts, and graduate degrees in Archival Science from the University of Rome, and in Archival Science, Paleography, and Diplomatics from the School of Archival Science, Paleography and Diplomatics of the State Archives of Rome. Prior to moving to Canada in 1987, she was a Researcher in the professorial ranks of the Special School for Archivists and Librarians at the University of Rome, and served as State Archivist in the State Archives of Rome.

For her university work Dr. Duranti was honoured in 1999 with the Faculty Association's Academic of the Year Award, in 2005 with the Killam Research Prize, and in 2007 with the Jacob Biely Research Prize, the University of British Columbia’s “premier research award.” She is active nationally and internationally in several archival associations and in boards and committees, such as the Italy’s Supreme Council for Cultural Properties (2007-2010) and the UNESCO International Advisory Committee of the Memory of the World Program (2007-2011), and has been the President of the Society of American Archivists for the year 1998-99. She publishes widely on archival history and theory, and on diplomatics.

Dr. Duranti’s research aims at finding solutions to digital records issues that are not specific to a given socio-cultural and juridical context but can be universally applied. She is presently Project-Director of InterPARES (1999-2012), the largest interdisciplinary, collaborative research project on the long-term preservation of authentic electronic records. The project, now in its third phase and tenth year, has involved over time twenty five countries and hundreds of researchers, and has produced standards, guidelines, theory and methods which have been adopted worldwide. For the InterPARES contribution to the management of authentic digital records Dr. Duranti has been honoured with the 2006 Emmett Leahy Award, which is annually presented by the Institute of Certified Records Managers to “an individual who is internationally recognized as a leader and innovator in the area of records and information management,” and with the 2006 British Columbia Innovation Council Award, which is annually presented to “an individual who has opened new frontiers to scientific research.”

Dr. Duranti drafted DoD 5015.2 (1997), Moreq1 (1998), and 2 (2008), all key standards in records management in the digital environment.

In addition to the InterPARES project, Dr. Duranti is responsible as the principal investigator for the “Digital Records Forensics” project, which she carries out in collaboration with UBC experts in the law of evidence and the Vancouver Police Department.
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The Community Collage (CoCollage) is designed to cultivate community in a café, a quintessential “third place”, by bringing the richness of online social software into a physical community space. The system shows photos and quotes uploaded to a web site by café patrons and staff on a large computer display in the café,... providing a new channel for awareness, interactions and relationships among people there. We describe the CoCollage system and report on insights and experiences resulting from a 2-month deployment of the system, focusing on the impact the system has had on the sense of community within the café.

Our initial studies focused on a CoCollage deployment at our first venue (Trabant Coffee & Chai Lounge, in the University District on NE 45th St). We now have over 20 venue partners around Seattle, and are in the process of formulating our research questions and methodology to assess the impact of this place-based social networking tool, especially with respect to where and why it seems to be more widely adopted - and effective - in some venues and less so in others. We would welcome the opportunity both to present what we've done thus far and get some valuable input from the iSchool community about the issues we're exploring now ... and those we may wish to explore in the future.

<Bio>
Joe McCarthy is Principal Instigator at Strands Labs Seattle, where he leads a team in the design, development and deployment of technologies to help people discover other people, places and things of interest in the online and offline worlds. Prior to joining Strands, Joe was a research scientist at Nokia, Intel and Accenture. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, and his career includes earlier roles as an entrepreneur, professor, consultant, and musician. Other roles he currently enjoys include husband, father, wine aficionado and blogger (http://gumption.typepad.com).
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The Capstone event showcases the breadth of skills and expertise students develop in the Bachelor of Science in Informatics and Master of Science in Information Management programs. In these poster and oral presentations of their culminating projects, students demonstrate how they have been using information as a tool ...for transformation in their personal, academic and professional lives.

Capstone project collaborators include organizations from the public, private and non-profit sectors, and each project represents a concrete example of what it means to design and build novel applications of technology that meet the needs of people. With projects ranging from building social networking applications to improving services for homeless youth to supporting more efficient mass transit, the Capstone event is a great introduction to the ways the UW iSchool makes information work.

Agenda

Student Check-in: 5:30–6:00, HUB East Ballroom

Program Presentation: 6:00–7:00, HUB Auditorium

Welcome: Dr. Harry Bruce, Dean and Professor

Student Presentations from current Informatics and Day/Exec MSIM students

Interactive Poster Sessions: 7:00–8:30, HUB East Ballroom

Student Presentations: 7:30–8:30, HUB 209

Awards and Closing: 8:45, HUB East Ballroom Read More

Our latest information and communication technologies can be powerful tools, helping us to connect to valuable sources of knowledge, to one another, and to the world. But they can also serve to distract and disconnect us, and thus to impede the search for meaning in an increasingly complex and busy world.

Although the a...nthropologist Ernest Becker had little to say about technology, his perspective on the search for meaning in the face of human mortality helps to explain how and why technology plays this double role, as both an enabler and a disabler. Becker's theoretical stance also suggests personal and communal strategies through which society might mitigate, if not eliminate, the worst effects of technology.

Drawing on Becker's work, the panel will address the challenges presented by new technologies (including video game addiction and the distracting effects of cell phone and email use), and will discuss technology's impact on society and the human condition.

Speakers include:
Hilarie Cash, a psychotherapist specializing in video game and Internet addictions
Sheldon Solomon, an experimental existential social psychologist at Skidmore College
Marcel O'Gorman, a media theorist at the University of Waterloo
Jason Hawreliak, a PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo
David Levy, a computer scientist at the University of Washington Information School
Daniel Liechty, a social work professor and Becker scholar with doctorates in both religion and philosophy

More info, plus registration (strongly encouraged!) at http://www.ernestbecker.org/events.htmlRead More