Déjà vu

I picked up the Ackerman article and was immediately struck with a sense of Déjà vu.  I am sure I have read this paper before.  In fact, it’s in my references for EndNote citations.  For the life of me, I cannot figure out where I read it previously or why.  I looked in my usual repositories – EndNote, my list of PDF’s, the laptop’s search function, and even Bibsonomy.  Well, I didn’t find it except in the EndNote citations.  I suppose I’ve used it for a previous paper somewhere but figuring out just where is too much like work. 

I did see that Wil Silberman, Alex Vandergrift, Jenn Nippert, and Carolyn Millsap have all used it.  Using Bibsonomy to see who else in the class is talking about something that you are talking about is really helpful.  (See section 3.1 of Ackerman’s paper).  Ackerman et al. state,

“In general, expertise sharing systems vary considerably in how people’s profiles are created, including what data is used and how users are involved; how relative expertise is determined; how queries or people are matched to people; and, how recommendations are made”.

which is very likely true because things do vary considerably.  However, it’s the section about “how queries or people are matched to people” that I want to chat about.  During my stint as a search product manager at Documentum, we did some studies and showed that just querying a database or profile about people and the results isn’t very interesting.  Rather, we used the individual’s search queries to help identify when they might be relevant to another.  Now, we can do this because all the people on the system are employees or contractors, so it’s not quite like Facebook (see Wil Silberman) and we use use one’s search history to help them.  As it turns out, people and their search behavior is a very good indicator of related work, related interest, and some amount of six degrees of separation.  Whether or not you can or should use that as a determinant is up to you.  Jenn Nippert and Emily Collier do a nice job bringing that up in their blogs.

Wang & Lu took a look at one manufacturer’s response to a crisis: their moped offering (‘ECR’) suffered from design flaws.  As a result, the brand reputation of the manufacturer overall was suffering and they decided to truly effect change across the entire company and learn from the issues.  I have to salute the management team for this one because you don’t see it often: holistic creation and fostering of communities of practice, mentoring of staff on how to address issues head-on, particularly customer facing issues, and using what knowledge they had then documenting it to make it all come together for them.  (Stephen Antczak does a nice job of outlining how less-than-ideal circumstances can lead to some interesting KM practices in this post).  It so easily could have been a poor implementation of KM but it was in fact a success.  While I can’t really relate it to Ackerman’s work, I can certainly relate it to Nonaka’s.  (Which is next or I wouldn’t bring it up).  I struggle to relate Wang & Lu to Ackerman because the crisis work was so focused on the human aspects – the people, employees, dealers, etc., and not so much on a computer system implementation of KM, which is Ackerman’s big thing – and Ackerman is not so much, until late in the paper (section 4 or so) about sharing knowledge and future directions.  I think the Wang & Lu paper should inform work that builds on Ackerman’s.  Carolyne Millsap (pretty much) makes my point in her blog post, “Sharing Knowledge Transfer(red) Expertise: competitive advantage through organizational stories“.

I decided to (re)read Nonaka after reading Wang & Lu; something in the back of my head about the Nonaka paper resonated with the crisis described by Wang & Lu.  (This isn’t quite ejà vu, but close).  And I found it, on page 22:

In order to raise the total quality of an individual’s knowledge, the enhancement of tacit knowledge has to be subjected to a continual interplay with the evolution of relevant aspects of explicit knowledge.

It seems eerily prescient of the crisis described by Wang & Lu where the management team elects to reinforce employee knowledge by having them participate (actively) in communities of practice.  BOOM!

Bibliography

Ackerman, M. S., Dachtera, J., Pipek, V. & Wulf, V. (2013). Sharing Knowledge and Expertise: The CSCW View of Knowledge Management. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 22, 531–573. doi: 10.1007/s10606-013-9192-8

Nonaka, I. (1994). A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation. Organization Science, 5, 14–37.

Wang, W.-T. & Lu, Y.-C. (2010). Knowledge transfer in response to organizational crises: An exploratory study. Expert Systems with Applications, 37, 3934–3942. doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2009.11.023