KM Bingo!

Let's be real, scholarly reading can be pretty exhausting, however it is also great exercise for building your critical thinking skills which is why we do it. That doesn't mean you can't have fun with the process. So this week, I read articles by Levy, Tremblay, and Yuan et al and some of you may have seen my tweet the other night where I joked about developing a play-along bingo game for the Tremblay article. Where did that come from you ask? Well let me explain! Tremblay's article, The Information Society: From Fordism to Gatesism: The 1995 Southam Lecture* is about the "the greater integration of information and communication into the function of economy and society" that had been mostly unchanged since Henry Ford's Model T assembly line (Fordism) but is now being altered with the onset of the Information Age (Gatesism, as in Bill Gates) (p. 1). 

One of the things I liked about this piece is how Tremblay points out, with great self awareness, that information and communication professionals are getting wrapped up in their optimism and not approaching the "information society" in a realistic manner.  I believe he referred to it as "inveterate progressivism." He goes on to list different inventions that he imagines will be available in about ten to twenty years. This brings us to the bingo joke, because quite  a few of those inventions came to pass (p.5): 

"Television sets, which can pick up many more channels than today's television, can also be used in conjunction with small keyboards to provide a multitude of communication services." - Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV 

"There is less need for physical travel than in an earlier era. Banking can be done from home, and so can as much shopping as is desired..." - Amazon, Banking Apps, can you imagine Tremblay's thoughts on Amazon's proposed drone delivery service? 

"Some homes have machines that receive transmitted documents. With these new machines one can obtain business paperwork, new items selected to match one's interests, financial or stock market reports, mail, bank statements, airline schedules, and so on..." - Fax machine, 3D printer, oh and the iPhone, for the win! 

"Citizens can wear radio devices for automatically calling police or ambulances if they wish." - Life Alert, anybody? 

"Homes have burglar and fire alarms connected to the police and fire stations.." I believe ADT or other various home security companies have things like this. 

So my idea was that I could put these inventions on a bingo sheet to be checked off as you read the article and match it up to Tremblay's ideas. Silly, I know. Anyway, this is a very interesting article, especially when you consider it was written in 1995. The next article I read was WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management by Levy, which basically discussed whether or not WEB 2.0 is just a passing phase and what, if any affect will it have on organizational knowledge management. In the paper Levy reviews what WEB 2.0 is and what it constitutes based on various literature. One of the concepts Levy lists is WEB as a platform, and Musser and O’Reilly explained with a very good example that “it [WEB 2.0] should be treated as a platform and not as a main application. Just as the telephone is regarded as a channel, while the conversation is the essence, WEB 2.0 applications should be treated as channels only (p. 122).” 

As for knowledge management 2.0, research seems to be mixed, or as Levy puts it “confused.” Since it is still a new field it “is struggling in organizations wishing to manage their knowledge.” However, I don’t think this is cause for concern because you can’t blame a business for being cautious in accepting new concepts when the research is this new and mixed. I think it will eventually come together in a way that businesses can adapt it into concepts that better their knowledge management processes. 

The last article I read for this post is The Use of Different Information and Communication Technologies to Support Knowledge Sharing in Organizations: From E-Mail to Micro-Blogging by Yuan et al. This article discusses how new communication technology tools like e-mail, social media, wikis, blogging, etc. can facilitate information sharing in companies. In my opinion, this article closely relates to the Levy article, because in a way it also talks about WEB 2.0's affect on knowledge management, except this article relies more on the technology itself and the employee's perspective. The authors interviewed a bunch of employees from a large company in order to get their input. One of the interesting observations from the interviews was that “more than half of internal social media users interviewed think the increased social capital associated with social media use increases their motivation for sharing expertise with one another (p.1664).” Which makes sense, because if a person is talking about what they got done, or what important project they are working on, then it could motivate people to post about their output as well, and if you have not been doing anything then you certainly cannot post that you have! The study also mentions that companies need to carefully consider the ICTs they use because without support or proper design, they can have the opposite affect on employees. 

References

Levy, M. (2009). WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management. Journal of knowledge management, 13(1), 120-134.

Tremblay, G. (1995). The Information Society: From Fordism to Gatesism: The 1995 Southam Lecture. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20(4).

Yuan, Y. C., Zhao, X., Liao, Q., & Chi, C. (2013). The use of different information and communication technologies to support knowledge sharing in organizations: From e‐mail to micro‐blogging. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 64(8), 1659-1670.

*Do journals pay writers based on the length of the article title?