Today’s post could rightly be called a reflection. I’ve been spouting off about big data, documenting it all, tacit knowledge (that stuff that everyone knows but no one writes down), web technologies, etc., etc., etc. So naturally in the Knowledge Management class we have to read and review a few articles from the syllabus (pick two from column* A, one from column B). Today’s aggregated postings have articles about wikis, Web 2.0 technologies, and Knowledge Transfer. Not unlike a KFOG My 3 Songs contest, the common thread across all 3 articles is which technological approach is best suited to getting knowledge transferred across an organization?
Kang, et al, make the hypothesis that “organizations increase their effort for knowledge transfer and frequently interact with knowledge sources when the knowledge is highly tacit” and then organizations are then more likely to try and contact knowledge sources. In my position as a competitive intelligence analyst, I provide information to field sales teams to help them sell and position our technology more effectively. Studying my audience and their motivations is an occupational requirement. I concur, for the most part, with the conclusions drawn by Kang, et al, about the frequency, effort, and the types of contact made by knowledge seekers. Most sales personnel will try and understand the information being imparted and look for some way to inculcate it into their sales strategies. For my part (and that of my teammates on the Competitive Intelligence team), we spend significant effort in making the knowledge easy to consume and transfer. Kang points out, “Because tacit knowledge is unique and relatively less mobile, it becomes the basis of organizations’ competitive advantage (Grant, 1996a). It is difficult to imitate and transfer tacit knowledge and thus hard to transfer and acquire”. We do everything we can to facilitate that knowledge transfer. There is a certain degree of assumption behind the reader’s ability to consume the information; that is, we have make a deliberate decision about the nature of the information we will explicitly describe and that which we will not describe. That does not prevent the sales teams from asking questions that range in the area of that tacit information – we simply don’t answer those.
Schillewaert, et al. (2005), point out two fundamental conclusions about sales people and their adoption of technology: first, that sales people will try the technology if they think it will save them time and help them make money (that is, do their job better and faster). Second, they will stick with the technology more than 6 months if it is easy to use. Naturally, adoption rates are skewed somewhat if management makes something mandatory – still adoption across an entire team can be spotty if the foundational elements are not present. Grace (2009) focuses her discussion on wikis, their adoption across enterprises, and their ease of use. Her discussion is one that is favorably inclined to using wikis as a means of knowledge distribution. While I like wiki’s just fine, I have to point out that the audience has a lot more to say about the value of any one technology. Anyone looking to implement a knowledge management system should not be casual about the choice of technology. In my humble opinion, wikis are not suited to field sales personnel. They might be acceptable for some field support personnel, but in general, the field tends to use small form factors – mobile devices – and wikis are not well suited to that display. As a corollary to my point – that the audience has certain desires and constraints which are generally tacit in nature but nonetheless important, please see this video about the iconic London Tube map. In the video discussion, the narrator makes the point that Tube travelers really didn’t care about the geography of the ground above them; they just wanted to be about to use the system. There are so many tacit assumptions in the London Tube map, yet everyone seems to just love it. It’s not even a map, not in the traditional sense. Yet, it’s been a success for roughly 80 years. What is going on with this ‘technology adoption’?
Levy (2009) makes an attempt to examine the rise of web technology tools (aka Web 2.0) such as wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, Tagging (taxonomies), and social computing but goes on to make the point that “WEB 2.0 should affect knowledge management in organizations; yet, it cannot be copied, as differences between the two will not enable organizations to benefit from such”. In this, she is making my point about the adoption rate of any technology for a given group of users; it must seem to save them time, effort, or resource; and for sustained usage, adopters must find it easy to use. Design then, is key. One cannot simply expect organic Knowledge Management systems to result simply because something like Web 2.0 technology is made available. Levy uses a comment from Tebbutt (2007), “…forcing people to encode their knowledge formally is not easy – in fact, it can’t be done. But when people are socialising, even in a work context, they are much happier to share their thoughts and their experiences” to hammer this point home.
Its this juxtaposition that shows the schism between a simple IT project and a design driven KM (knowledge management) project. It is very similar to another schism I’m seeing in the Library and Information Science community – the split between Information Retrieval – advanced and espoused by the technologists and computer science community; and the other side, the softer, more human side: Information Search. One is machine oriented, the other is human oriented. In a digital world, one must be prepared to deal with both.
Bibliography:
Schillewaert, N., Ahearne, M. J., Frambach, R. T. & Moenaert, R. K. (2005). The adoption of information technology in the sales force. Industrial Marketing Management, 34, 323–336. doi: 10.1016/j.indmarman.2004.09.013
Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13, 64–74.
Kang, J., Rhee, M. & Kang, K. H. (2010). Revisiting knowledge transfer: Effects of knowledge characteristics on organizational effort for knowledge transfer.. Expert Syst. Appl., 37, 8155-8160.
Levy, M. (2009). WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Manageent, 13, 120-134.
KFOG My 3 Songs contest – a (sadly, now defunct) daily contest for a prize run by KFOG: 
In this scenario, the songs would be the articles and the the artists would be the authors of the articles.
* I crack myself up – I almost wrote Gollum instead of column.
The relevance to the title, you ask? Well, I would say that Grace is ‘in love’ with wikis. Her article seemed to be touting them as a cure for all things knowledge. I like wikis as a mechanism for communicating but they have their issues, as I noted above.
One must remember to not be so in love with the answer that they forget to address the question.
It’s true, especially early on and especially by some of the less academic of articles, of a Field of Dreams presumption in the KM literature — that is, “if you build it, they will come.” You’re right — that’s a bit simplistic and naive!
But then that’s the point of the Schillewaert et al. article, right? — to ask what factors influence technology adoption. As you note, design is important, but the 9 hypotheses in that article raise some interesting non-design issues in adoption: e.g., user training (an “organizational facilitator”), peer usage (a “social influence”), etc. The peer usage aspect is particularly interesting because it highlights the communal aspect of adoption. Customer interest was not found to be an influence in adoption — because customers are outside the community, perhaps. I don’t know — something to explore.
That’s an interesting perspective summary – I find it similar to nature versus nurture – in that people would tend to use what the community uses as it would facilitate communication but sometimes some other approach is better suited. I recall one VP saying that while Facebook and other social tech was interesting, people still use email inside the community of the company. If I don’t use chat, then it doesn’t make much sense to try and talk to me via that medium.
The bigger insight that I took away from both the Schillewaert article and the London Tube map – which none of the other articles really addressed sadly – was the continued use of the technology. The map has stood the test of time for roughly 80 years! and so one of the questions we should be asking ourselves is, ‘what is the measure of adoption’? What drives continued use? How can we measure the transfer of knowledge?
I admit that I threw that last one in as a bit of whimsy but now that I’ve written it, I realize that it’s the most relevant question of all.
So the questions you raise about design as being a key factor to enable knowledge transfer, and even innovation, reminds me of a book I have been reading for work. It’s called Design Thinking for the Greater Good, published 2017 by Columbia University Press. The authors, Jeanne Liedtka, Daisy Azer, and Randy Salzman, have gathered success stories and techniques to use to help organizations in the social sector to better design their processes and even their facilities so they are more useful. I copied a lot of the diagrams into a OneNote for future reference, but one of my favorite parts was at the beginning of the book, where there was a discussion about relying on “experts” to come up with the best design versus the “everybody is a designer” collaborative approach. It was the opinion of the authors that this second type of design work results in a better result.
I posted so of this earlier on slack, but no designer would think of building a UI without getting the users involved. Experts aren’t much use in designing stuff if there is no problem to solve. Now watching users is called contextual inquiry. And my previous snippet:
“UxD people call @Carolyne’s idea (2 or 3 people watch someone doing a task) a ‘Contextual Inquiry”. Imagine a software designer sitting in a user’s cube and watching them go about their daily business. They might see that the terminal is well decorated – nay, littered! – with yellow post-its reminding people how to do x, y, or z. Yet you would never hear someone actually say they needed that in the design requirements. That’s what designers learn from a ‘CI’. They are great fun but a ton of work”.
I think it is interesting and novel how you pointed out the importance of design of wikis and how it contributes to usability. I never considered how they are less usable on mobile devices. In pharmacy school, we often use Sharepoint. And its a pain to use on anything smaller than an iPad. And even the iPad can be a nuisance with the site. I had just never connected the two ideas. Great thoughts!
It was during our first attempt to build a mobile client that we became familiar with the restrictions that a mobile device brings: if you present a list of things to the user, it must be presorted – you cannot expect enough computing power on the device to do that work locally. If it has a lot of graphics, you must compress them so as to use as little bandwidth as possible or the experience will be slow and users will be frustrated. If you make the mobile device do a lot of work, the battery life will be shortened.
So many things to consider.