Breaking the Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck Through Conversational Knowledge Management

Abstract

Much of today's organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people's heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligencebased approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

A comparative analysis of the usage and infusion of wiki and non-wiki-based knowledge management systems

“…Although several studies involving technology innovation acceptance have provided empirical evidence supporting the influence of various factors, examples of ineffective implementation still exist [14,68]. This research indicates that consideration of the perceived characteristics of innovating together with reciprocity expectation and personal innovativeness is important for organizations contemplating the implementation of KMS.…”

“…The addition of knowledge representation and maintenance features of wiki technology allows for more effective knowledge sharing [68]. Wikis also facilitate knowledge searching and filtering activities that are made possible by linking and indexing capabilities.…”

Exploring Appropriation of Enterprise Wikis:

“…Wikis may form suitable platforms to support identification, acquisition, development, distribution, preservation, and use of knowledge within the enterprise, which are the 'knowledge management building blocks' of Probst et al (2000). As most of the organizational knowledge resides in people's heads, collaborative conversational knowledge management tools including wikis may help to widen the bottleneck of knowledge acquisition (Wagner 2006). Besides wikis and traditional weblogs, two further applications are currently gaining importance: social networking services (DiMicco et al 2008;Richter and Koch 2008;Richter and Riemer 2009) and microblogging services (Riemer and Richter 2010;Zhang et al 2010; Barnes et al 2010;Mueller and Stocker 2011).…”

CorpWiki: A self-regulating wiki to promote corporate collective intelligence through expert peer matching

“…First, since expertise is inescapably narrow, the experts of a specialized unit can focus only on a few aspects of knowledge and not on something as broad as the whole organizational information. Furthermore, expert consultancy may be accompanied by high latency in knowledge acquisition [75]. This is due to the fact that in hierarchical-based coordination, experts perform either isolated or in the limits of their specialized functional units and the necessary combination of knowledge is performed by moving up the hierarchy [33].…”