Knowing What We Know : Supporting Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Social Networks

The way in which this manager relied on his network to obtain information and knowledge critical to the success of an important project is common and likely resonates with your own experience. Usually when we think of where people turn for information or knowledge we think of databases, the Web, intranets and portals or other, more traditional, repositories such as file cabinets or policy and procedure manuals. However, a significant component of a person’s information environment consists of the relationships he or she can tap for various informational needs. For example, in summarizing a decade worth of studies, Tom Allen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that engineers and scientists were roughly five times more likely to turn to a person for information than to an impersonal source such as a database or a file cabinet. In other settings, research has consistently shown that who you know has a significant impact on what you come to know, as relationships are critical for obtaining information, solving problems, and learning how to do your work. Particularly in knowledge-intensive work, creating an informational environment that helps employees solve increasingly complex and often ambiguous problems holds significant performance implications. Frequently such efforts entail knowledge-management initiatives focusing on the capture and sharing of codified knowledge and reusable work products. To be sure, these so-called knowledge bases hold pragmatic benefits. They bridge boundaries of time and space, allow for potential reuse of tools or work products employed successfully in other areas of an organization, and provide a means of reducing organizational “forgetting” as a function of employee turnover. However, such initiatives often undervalue crucial knowledge held by employees and the web of relationships that help dynamically solve problems and create new knowledge. As we move further into an economy where collaboration and innovation are increasingly central to organizational effectiveness, we must pay more attention to the sets of relationships that people rely on to accomplish their work. Certainly we can expect emerging collaborative technologies to facilitate virtual work and skill-profiling systems to help with the location of relevant expertise.