Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management
Publisher:The MIT Press (2002-12-02) | ISBN-10: 0262011956 | PDF | 15.3 Mb | 426 pages
The field of knowledge management focuses on how organizations can most
effectively store, manage, retrieve, and enlarge their intellectual
properties. The repository view of knowledge management emphasizes the
gathering, providing, and filtering of explicit knowledge. The
information in a repository has the advantage of being easily
transferable and reusable. But it is not easy to use decontextualized
information, and users often need access to human experts.
This book describes a more recent approach to knowledge management,
which the authors call "expertise sharing." Expertise sharing emphasizes
the human aspects--cognitive, social, cultural, and organizational--of
knowledge management, in addition to information storage and retrieval.
Rather than focusing on the management level of an organization,
expertise sharing focuses on the self-organized activities of the
organization’s members. The book addresses the concerns of both
researchers and practitioners, describing current literature and
research as well as offering information on implementing systems. It
consists of three parts: an introduction to knowledge sharing in large
organizations; empirical studies of expertise sharing in different types
of settings; and detailed descriptions of computer systems that can
route queries, assemble people and work, and augment naturally occurring
social networks within organizations.