The New York Times I.B.M. Meets With 52,600, Virtually
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" "Intuitively, people feel there should be immense value in knowledge sharing, but no one has gotten their arms around how you do it in a large organization and how you measure its effect," said Steven L. Telleen, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology research firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

Jonathan Spira, chairman of Basex, a New York firm that studies online communities and knowledge management, said the experiment was fascinating for more than its scale. The audience WorldJam tried to corral for focused brainstorming was so broad that many members had little in common, which is typical of many far-flung enterprises in business and government." [ via tomalak ]

IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper
""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

First Monday It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age
"The old adage, "It's not what you know, but who you know," could, paradoxically, be the motto for the Information Age. We discuss the emergence of personal social networks as the main form of social organization in the workplace. A dazzling new battery of communication technologies enables workers to connect to diverse, far-flung social networks. The seemingly sudden appearance of people in restaurants talking into their cell phones, the smash success of the Palm products, the increasing use of instant messaging at the office, the chirp of pagers in meetings - all herald the intense moment-by-moment communication activity of workers plugging into their social networks. Castells described the network society in the large (Castells, 1996). We report our ethnographic study of the ways people wield their personal social networks to get things done at work. Our investigation provides a worm's eye view of the network society."

redux [05.24.01]
Fortune I Know What You Mean. And I Can't Do Anything About It.
"Knowledge is power.

No, it's not. This deceitful truism is the Big Lie of the Information Age. For most people in most organizations, knowledge confers impotence, not power.

Why? Because more often than not, managers and employees are expressly forbidden from acting on what they know."

"That's not to say that enterprises should err on the side of concealing rather than revealing knowledge. But it is in everyone's best interest to be honest about the organizational reality that knowledge is seldom power. On the contrary, knowledge confirms the absence of meaningful power. Working with that proposition is the true challenge for those zealots who advocate "knowledge management.""

Michael H. Zack If Managing Knowledge is the Solution, then What's the Problem?
"Load, from a knowledge perspective then, is the amount of knowledge processing that a firm must perform within some time interval to manage complexity, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity to perform its tasks and execute its strategy, as well as to adapt to change and maintain the organization itself. Overload occurs when the organization is unable to perform the amount of processing required because that amount is too great, given the time and resources available. The challenge is for the organization and its members to develop sufficient intellectual resources and processing capabilities to manage or reduce equivo cality, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty. Alternately, the organization may manage the knowledge environment generating that load (for example, by reducing the number of customers, serving more stable markets, or taking on simpler or more familiar tasks) to bring it into balance with its capabilities. Strategicaly, organizations must maintain a balance between overload and underload, in that overload reduces performance effectiveness by exceeding capabilities while underload reduces performance effectiveness by a lack of challenging experiences, stimulation for learning, and inefficient use of resources (Hedberg 1981, Tushman and Nadler 1978)."

Knowledge Media Institute Oracles, Bards, and Village Gossips, or, Social Roles and Meta Knowledge Management
"Knowledge management systems are used widely in many different organisations, yet there are few models and theories which can be used to help introduce and apply them successfully. In this paper, we analyse some of the more common problems for knowledge management systems. Using this background, we adapt models and theories from social and organisational psychology and computer supported collaborative work, and discuss a variety of different knowledge management systems in these contexts. We argue that knowledge management systems routinely adopt different social roles within an organisation, and that these social roles can have a major influence on a system's acceptability. With these principles in mind, we draw out some general practical lessons, and a 'character space' framework, which can help to inform the design of future knowledge management systems, so as to minimise the problems of acceptability within a given organisation."