Sharing Expertise: The Next Step for Knowledge Management
Publication Type:
Book ChapterSource:
Social Capital and Information Technology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2003)URL:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ackerm/pub/03e06/ackermanhalverson-sharing-expertise.pdfKeywords:
information access, information reuse, knowledge management, online communities, organizational memoryAbstract:
In this chapter, we move from the metaphor of knowledge management to a new metaphor, expertise sharing, which promotes focusing on the inherently collaborative and social nature of the problem.
Accordingly, we first show how the four standard mechanisms for sharing expertise and managing knowledge suffer from various collaborative and social issues. Underlying these issues is one of the intellectual challenges facing computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW or groupware) as a field. The gap between what we know we have to do socially and what computer science as a field knows how to do technically (what we call here the social-technical gap) has led the two of us to reflect on potential systems designs in order to ameliorate this social-technical gap. Accordingly, the last half of the chapter is a review of our research that has evolved into a more organizationally attentive direction. Our description of these research systems focuses on their incorporation of, or augmentation to, the structural and relational aspects of social capital. (We will largely leave the cognitive aspects aside, as we believe that much of knowledge management assumes these. In addition, we will use the terms “social-structural” and “social-relational” to differentiate them from the technology terms “structural” and “relational”.) We conclude with some potential future research directions.