Coffee & Knowledge Management

After reading Kelly's post about knowledge management and social media, I decided to read Customer knowledge management via social media: the case of Starbucks by Chua and Banerjee first this week. The goal of this article was for Chua & Banerjee to study how companies utilized social media to support their customer knowledge management. Customer knowledge management (CKM) is basically feedback from a company's customers that helps the company to see if/where change is needed. This particular study focused on Starbucks, and their social media usage. For the purpose of the study, the authors broke down social media into various categories, including (p. 239): Microblogging services (Twitter); social networking services (Facebook); location-aware mobile services (4Square); and corporate discussion forum services. Chua & Banerjee found that Starbucks is successful at utilizing and extrapolating CKM from its usage of social media. 

Like Kelly, I agree that companies should be cautious with incorporating social media just because of a study. First, it is not the right call for every business. I mean, what would a funeral home company tweet about? Second, it isn't about the amount of social media services you use, it is about how well you use them. Similarly, Joe mentioned in his post on this article, that effectiveness is the keyword when it comes to corporate social media. Quality over quantity, people. 

The next article I read was Methodology for the implementation of knowledge management systems by Chalmeta and Grangel. As Joe said in his post a few days ago, this article was pretty dry, albeit very straightforward! While many of the articles I've read thus far talk about the potential benefits of companies utilizing knowledge management practices, most of those articles also mention the lack of a method of implementation. This article aims to remedy that by providing the "KM-IRIS Methodology" which the authors split into five different phases (p. 744): Identification, extraction, representation, processing, and utilization. One of the things I liked about this article's methodology was the table that clearly delineated each phase of the methodology and how they can be applied (Fig. 1, pg. 745). Chalmeta and Grangel take this method and apply it to a business enterprise, in order to show it in practice, although they do acknowledge as one of the study's limitations that it was only tested once. 

The final article I read for this week was Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments (HVTEs) by Jones and Mahon. This article is kind of a throwback to my earlier readings about knowledge risk management, and the differences between explicit and tacit knowledge. For the purpose of this paper, high velocity/turbulent has nothing to do with airplanes, but instead with decisions that have life and death consequences. This paper draws from examples and seeks  to give a KM model for these situations. In this article, Jones and Mahon argue for a better/more training for management so that there can be a greater "development of tacit knowledge and potential approaches to dealing with HVTEs (p. 784)." Although, Jones and Mahon also admit that in calmer environments, explicit knowledge would still be important. 

References 

Chalmeta, R., & Grangel, R. (2008). Methodology for the implementation of knowledge management systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(5), 742-755. 

Chua, A. Y., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: the case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(2), 237-249.  

Jones, N. B., & Mahon, J. F. (2012). Nimble knowledge transfer in high velocity/turbulent environments. Journal of Knowledge Management, 16(5), 774-788.