Knowledge Management Systems, Social Media, & Organizational Learning

So I have finally come to the last blog post regarding our reading list! I have to admit at the beginning of the semester I was worried that I wouldn’t be disciplined enough to keep up with the class, but I made it! As for this blog, I still have to post about the folksonomy so I will probably do that next week. Also, I still plan on using this blog for posting about school and other library related tasks, so feel free to check back from time to time after we complete this class. 

So for my final readings I read Alavi and Leidner’s article, Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: conceptual foundations and research issues. Then I read Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age by Hemsley and Mason. Finally, I read the Huber article about Organizational learning. 

The first article by Alavi and Leidner discusses how many of the knowledge management processes (classification, etc.) have been around for most of history and how only in recent years have researchers really begun considering knowledge as an important tool for organizations. Alavi and Leidner go on to discuss how knowledge management systems are developed and implemented by examining important research issues in the field. This was relatively straightforward stuff, but it was pretty interesting overall given what I have already read this semester. 

The next article I read was one that many of you have already covered in your blogs, the Hemsley and Mason article. This article reminded me of the Nahapiet and Ghoshal article that I read last week. Mainly because Hemsley and Mason seemed to agree that social media facilitates knowledge creation, which is not a far cry from what Nahapiet & Ghoshal said, which was that social capital helps create intellectual capital. One of the neat things about this article is that the authors put forth the idea of a “knowledge ecosystem,” which the authors propose is the result of the collaboration and innovation that come from social media tools like blogs, wikis, and microblogging. Another interesting part of this article is how they begin, which is by dissecting how something “goes viral” and the outcome of such an event. As a fan of Twitter and YouTube, I really enjoyed this article and it would probably rank high on my list of favorite KM readings this semester. 

The final article I read was by Huber and it discusses organizational learning through a review of related literature. From this, Huber finds that organizational learning, like Blackler found about knowledge, is too broad to be assessed normally. Therefore, Huber broke organizational learning down into four categories: knowledge acquisition, information interpretation, organizational memory (which Anne discusses on her blog here, and information distribution. Interestingly enough, one of the things that Huber found in this article was that among scholars who research organizational learning, there is very little “cumulative work.” Huber hypothesizes that this is because researchers have difficulty finding one another and that even when they do, few agree with one another. Of course, this article was written in 1991, so it is much easier for researchers to find one another today, thanks to technology!  

 Sources

Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (2001). Review: Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues. MIS quarterly, 107-136.

Hemsley, J., & Mason, R. M. (2013). Knowledge and knowledge management in the social media age. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 23(1-2), 138-167.

Huber, G. P. (1991). Organizational learning: The contributing processes and the literatures. Organization science, 2(1), 88-115.