Knowledge Building In Today’s Fast-Paced Corporation
Corporations today are moving faster and faster to get new products and services to market to remain competitive, retaining and growing market share by attracting an ever expanding customer base. A critical factor to success in this rapidly changing environment is highly efficient and effective methods of employee knowledge building and sharing to support all aspects of a new product or service. Schmidt (2005) in his study of what he terms ‘Knowledge Maturing’ points out that traditional methods of employee development can not keep pace with “ever accelerating product and service lifecycles,” causing such issues as delays in the release of products and services, or lower quality and service (Introduction section, ¶ 1 ). It is critical that innovation and knowledge building must closely pace each other for success (Schmidt, 2005).
An understanding of what knowledge is as compared to information alone is essential for any study of knowledge creation within an organization. Dixon (2000) asserts that information is data that has been recorded, analyzed, and is accessible for use. Knowledge, on the other hand, “is defined as the meaningful link people make in their minds between information and its application in action in a specific setting” (p. 13).
As ‘traditional’ methods for employee knowledge building lose their value within corporations, new methods built upon more collaborative and community-centered processes are taking shape. Schmidt’s (2005) “Knowledge Maturing Process” includes five phases, the emergence of ideas, community formation, formalization, ad hoc training, and courses. Within the software industry, where product release cycles are extraordinarily fast, knowledge may not mature to the point of formal courses. “It is important to note that in many cases, the knowledge does not advance to the latest phases, but rather stays at the early phases until it turns out to be obsolete” (Schmidt, 2005, 2 Knowledge maturing process section, ¶ 7). Organizations that continue to adhere to traditional knowledge maturing processes run the risk of losing a competitive advantage when knowledge building and sharing processes do not keep pace with product development and release cycles.
Knowledge Building As Community Process
In order to retain competitive advantage, the need for community building, and the culture and tools necessary to support this process, has become essential for the learning and subsequent success of an organization. Communities form the basis of learning within an organization through shared experience, knowledge, and drive to a common goal.
According to Riel and Polin (2004):
The community derives its cohesion from the joint construction of a culture of daily life built upon behavioral norms, routines, and rules, and from a sense of shared purpose. Community activity also precipitates shared artifacts and ideas that support group activity and individual sense-making. (p. 18)
It is through the daily effort and work toward a shared goal that common knowledge is gained by the employees in the organization. This processes requires that individuals and teams take the time to stop and reflect upon the actions taken toward completion of a goal in order to learn from that experience and understand what contributed to either the success or failure of the effort (Dixon, 2000). This process of developing common knowledge is supported by the social constructivist theory of learning, which asserts that learning is a social process, based on experience, and situated within a given context (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
Individualized methods of working that reduce visibility, or limit social knowledge building, inhibit individual and community learning and ultimately impact the organization as a whole. While community knowledge building takes place in all organizations, those that recognize the value of this process and take steps to support and develop community interactions increase their potential of remaining competitive. In order to achieve their knowledge building and sharing goals, many organizations have successfully created Communities of Practice.
According to Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002), “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (p. 4). Within and across an organization many such communities of practice (CoP) exist that, through a process Lave and Wenger (1991) term “legitimate peripheral participation,” provide a way for new members to participate with existing members within a particular context. Lave and Wenger (1991) describe a community of practice as fundamental to the formation of knowledge as it creates the structure through which an organization knows itself. In other words a community must exist for knowledge to begin to be shared and retained within a given context.
Communities of Practice: Structure, Development, and Types
Communities of Practice are all based on three primary structural components: Domain, community, and practice. The domain refers to the area of interest for the members that they all share in common. The community is the basis of the individual connections and relationships within the group and, as with any relationship, trust and respect are key to successful interactions. Finally, the practice relates to the shared artifacts of the community, such as documents, stories, or tools. Each of these components must be nurtured for the ongoing success of the community of practice (Wenger et al., 2002).
Wenger et al. (2002) identify five stages of community development:
Potential: Loose connections between individuals and groups holding the potential for organizational value as a community.
Coalescing: Coming together as a community.
Maturing: Growing in membership and depth of knowledge.
Stewardship: Active, conscious development of shared knowledge.
Transformation: Ending, changing focus, or continuing on in current form.
Many communities of practice exist within organizations but may not be evident. Wenger et al. (2002) identified five relationships that communities may have within formal organizations: Unrecognized, which are unknown to the organization and possible to members as well; Bootlegged, which are comprised of and only known to a select group; Legitimized, where the organization has recognized the value of the community; Supported, where the organization provides resources to the community; and, Institutionalized, which are formal functioning part of the organization.
According to a 2000 APQC study of CoPs, there are four types of communities that exist within business organizations. These include, helping communities where participants share knowledge to help each other in their roles; knowledge-stewarding communities that manage a body of knowledge for use by others in the community; best-practice communities that create and share information related to best-practices and guidelines for use by members; and, innovation communities that focus on the creation of new ideas. These communities range from informal to highly structured organizations that form based on the needs of the organization. The benefits of CoPs for an organization can be both strategic and quantitative, including areas such as innovation, standardization, retention of intellectual capital, shortened decision making time, cost savings, and revenue generation (Blashka, 2006).
Community Knowledge Building Mediated By Technology
In addition to the necessary structural components, a Community of Practice also relies upon tools to foster and support community interaction and value creation. Schmidt (2005) asserts:
With the emergence of communities, an important step in knowledge maturing takes place: a common terminology is developed. Typical tools used in this phase are collaboration platforms and wikis, enabling communities to easily exchange their views and work together on common artefacts. This working together on a common subject area is the primary form of learning. (2 Knowledge maturing process section, ¶ 3)
With this assertion, Schmidt (2005) brings to light essential tools to the effective functioning of communities within corporations, namely web 2.0 resources such as wikis, blogs, sharepoints, discussion forums, online databases, and any number of existing and newly emerging web-based tools. A distinguishing factor in web 2.0 tools is the high accessibility by which they are characterized, allowing those traditionally considered consumers of web-based content to now rapidly produce and widely distribute their own content. Web 2.0 tools capture of the spirit of the internet as imagined by pioneer Tim Berners-Lee who first envisioned the web as a read/write media (Tredinnick, 2006). Web 2.0 tools and resources are also described as social learning technologies within the context of this report.
The Case For Change: Knowledge Building Enabled by Web 2.0
The traditional approaches to designing learning materials suited the needs of the business and product life cycles of the past very well. However, within recent years the speed of development and desire to rapidly get new products to market has increased the occurrence of situations whereby product support personnel have not had appropriate time to fully engage with and learn the new technologies themselves. The shortened timeline creates a challenge for learning and development teams to provide quality learning materials in a short time using ‘traditional’ methods of design and development. In order to stay competitive, Schmidt (2005) claims it is essential that all aspects of the business are able to meet the demands of rapid product life cycles. Adding to the urgency for change is the emergence of a new category of products, dubbed “Software as a Service” or SaaS. These products are characterized by rapid development and release cycles as compared to traditional desktop software products. This increased speed of release and update demands that employees have learning materials on a just-in-time basis and with very short notice to the learning and development team to create the necessary learning materials.
Over time, multiple solutions and tools have been introduced to attempt to overcome the traditional, often cumbersome and inefficient design methods with mixed results. Most tools, such as online databases, tracking changes in Microsoft Word documents, and using Adobe PDFs with notations enabled, fall victim to pitfalls such as version control, restrictive development processes, and organization, storage, and retrieval challenges. Drawbacks to this model are many, including individualized working processes, multiple tools and process steps, and ‘locking’ of information within the file format. Updates and changes to learning materials are cumbersome and difficult to track and involve processes that stifle both innovation and efficiency. Bernoff (2008) described the problem in this way:
You e-mail me the latest proposal for my comments. I comment on it and send it back to you and the other people on the list. But somebody else had a comment, too, so I’m already working on an obsolete version. Maybe next time I’ll wait until the end, so everybody else can get their comments in and I can go last. Except if we all do that, nothing gets done. (p. 30)
Barriers to Collaboration
Even when the desire for collaboration exists within a community of practice, traditional design and communication methods limit visibility into the details of the specific project and ultimately undermine efficiency. At times, this limited view is exacerbated by individuals who desire to only share complete, or nearly complete, work even during the development phase of a project. With the rapid nature of business, these tendencies lead to bottlenecks and process inefficiencies that lead to delays and missed delivery dates. Bernoff (2008) provides one possible solution to these challenges that was implemented recently by a particular software development company stating, “They realized that the problem was that everybody was working on the same stuff, but that stuff was scattered and wasn’t easy to find. So they started a wiki” (p. 30).
Social Learning Technologies
Social Learning Technologies, or web 2.0 tools such as wikis, are being increasingly leveraged by corporations as collaborative platforms to increase efficiency, partner across teams, and support rapidly changing business demands. Tapscott and Williams (2006) share this view:
Just as the new Web is revolutionizing media, culture, and the economy, it is reshaping organizations and workplaces in a profound way. Peer production and co-creation are not just happening in online communities and networks like MySpace, Linux, and Wikipedia. Increasingly employees are using blogs, wikis, and other new tools to collaborate and form ad hoc communities across departmental and organizational boundaries. (p. 240)
Wiki use for increased collaboration within corporate settings dates back to the WikiWikiWeb, which “…was developed in 1994 by Ward Cunningham in order to make the exchange of ideas between programmers easier” (“WikiWikiWeb,” 2008, ¶ 1). Hasan and Pfaff (2006) share reports of companies like IBM, the Disney Corporation, and British Telecommunications using wikis as tools to collaboratively build and share knowledge.
A key to wikis and other social learning technologies is their ability to enable distributed cognition processes by mediating interactions between individuals across time and space. Smith (1999) reinforces this idea, “People think in relationship with others and use various tools. Different cognitions will emerge in different situations” (Situated learning section, ¶ 2). This collaborative ability inherent in these systems supports collective thinking processes through which shared knowledge is built.
Motivation to Participate: Risks and Rewards
However, simply launching a wiki, or any tool in and of itself, will not immediately solve important business needs related to knowledge sharing and create a community of practice. Nielsen (2002) as cited by Buffa (2006) noted that “If a company’s organization is bad, if there is too much social friction, employees will not share knowledge and the solution to the working better problem can not be improved or solved by a magic tool” (2.2 Intranet: the employee’s point of view, ¶ 2)!
This being said, wikis and other Information and Communication Technology, referred to as ICT, have been shown to improve access to and sharing of information among “knowledge workers” by cutting through barriers of time and distance (Hendriks, 1999). Breaking down these barriers becomes a part of the necessary cultural transformation that must also accompany the introduction of social knowledge building tools to ensure adoption and long-term sustainability within a community of practice.
The motivation to participate in knowledge building within a virtual community is essential for success of the effort (Ardichvili, Page, & Wentling, 2003). Motivation can be seen in relation to the perceived or actual risks and benefits associated with participation. The risks and benefits associated with the use of wikis for knowledge building and sharing within a corporate setting can be analyzed from the perspective of both the corporation and individuals involved in the process.
From an individual perspective, risks may include loss of time invested contributing content, loss of ownership of work, loss of competitive advantage, and risks to reputation, among others. From a benefit standpoint, a recent study has shown that wiki users identified three primary benefits to participation in corporate wikis: making work easier, helping the organization to improve, and enhanced reputation (Corporate wiki users: Results of a survey, 2006, August 21-23). Of these three benefits, ease of work and organizational improvements were seen as the most notable reasons for participation in a wiki within a corporate setting, with improved reputation as a lesser factor (Majchrzak, Wagner, & Yates, 2005).
Dixon (2000) indicates that for knowledge sharing to be successful there must exist a tie to personal benefit, particularly of the type that you get from helping someone directly:
Little personal benefit comes from contributing to a database that is accessed by others with whom I have no connection and moreover from whom I am unlikely to hear. A database is like a black hole. It gives nothing back-no thank you, no smile, no sigh of relief, no enthusiasm on the other end of the line. (p. 8 )
For the corporation, a move to include wikis as a knowledge-sharing collaboration tool can bring a risk in terms of time, effort, and quality of information. As wikis are used more widely within corporations for knowledge workers to build and share knowledge there is a risk in inaccurate or misleading information being created and disseminated across the organization. (Tredinnick, 2006) As the shared knowledge of an organization is often a key factor to differentiation and competitive market position the risk to the corporation can be significant.
As with any business decision, considerations of the return on the investment in terms of limited resources must always be made when knowledge building and sharing processes are selected. Bukowitz and Williams (2000) have identified two conditions of knowledge sharing for an organization that indicate whether the investment in time and money necessary to create and support knowledge sharing tools and processes is worthwhile. One condition is that the process of employees engaging in building and sharing knowledge must lead to innovation. The other condition requires that any created knowledge be shared openly throughout the organization such that new information may be culled from the source and used profitably by the company. Only one of the conditions is necessary to ensure that the investment is of value.
Along with the risks of sunk costs, there are also enormous risks from a cultural perspective for a corporation as participation may simply not happen. Applying technology alone, in the shape of wikis and other social knowledge building tools, will not change an organization’s culture. Tredinnick (2006) suggests that for tools such as wikis to thrive within a corporation, employees must believe that they will not be putting themselves at risk personally by contributing. For the use of web 2.0 tools to be successful within a corporation, the culture should be such that contributing to shared knowledge tools is not seen as unique, but rather the standard operating procedure for all.
In spite of these risks, the growing body of literature indicates that wikis provide an effective way for an organization to increase collaboration, extend the usability of knowledge, and improve processes (Majchrzak et al., 2005). In the book, Wikinomics, Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, a software company that provides wikis and other social technologies to corporations, shares his opinion of why wikis work saying, “[Wikis and other collaborative tools] have very different properties, because they ask users to share control, and that actually fosters trust. The more participation that you have… the greater quality you’ll have in a project, in the same way that open source works” (Tapscott &Williams, 2006, p. 254).
While wikis are being identified by researchers as key to successful knowledge sharing within corporations, there are alternatives, such as sharepoints, blogs, forums, and other tools, such as proprietary knowledge bases. Another alternative to the use of any one tool on its own is the concept of combining multiple, complementary collaboration tools to increase effectiveness. This allows for more than one collaboration style to be leveraged to meet varied business needs. Bringing together multiple tools in this way allows participants to engage in the method that best suits their preferences and styles (Drakos, 2006).
Summary of Findings
The use of social learning technologies has been shown to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of collaboration between work groups. These tools help remove or reduce barriers to knowledge sharing and increase access to and re-usability of information within and throughout corporate organizations. When balanced with the cultivation of social and community-oriented activities, the thoughtful introduction of a wiki, or other social knowledge building and sharing technology, is a way to close gaps in space and time between knowledge sharers within a corporation, both aiding in the creation of and sustaining the ongoing growth of a community of practice.
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