Overcoming Organisational Resistance to Using Wiki Technology for Knowledge Management

Although Wikis emerged in the public domain more than a decade ago, a number of business organisations are now discovering the advantages of using Wiki technology to manage knowledge. However, there are many who are not convinced about the merits of this relatively new Wiki technology and are not yet prepared to risk its adoption because it exhibits many ideas that have yet to be tested and many issues that have yet to be resolved. This paper studies the merits of using a Wiki for knowledge management. While some cases of corporate adoption of Wiki technology have been reported, cases of organisations deciding to disallow the instillation and use of Wikis are rarely reported. The paper focuses on the case of an organisation that has declined to adopt Wiki Technology by identifying some of the key organisational issues that have contributed to its resistance. These key issues include the challenge to centralised control of Information Systems, as well as social elements, such as a lack of recognition of authorship, vandalism and slander. The very nature of a Wiki makes it difficult to apply traditional Intellectual Property rights, such as copyright, and this may give rise to legal controversies and conflicts of interpretations. This paper concludes with recommendations on how to overcome the obstacles that can deter organisations from using Wiki technology to act as a knowledge conduit for the organisation

Knowledge Management in an Organisational Climate of Uncertainty and Change: A Longitudinal Case Study of an Australian University

Universities are in the knowledge business and are expected to be at the forefront of knowledge management (KM). However, KM in a university is complex given the diversity of stakeholder groups. This is exacerbated in the Australian context by the changing climate of rationalisation, corporatisation and marketisation universities faced in the past decade. This paper investigates KM strategies in an Australian university to uncover barriers to knowledge-sharing among academics. Although the organisational infrastructure supports KM, many academics have not actively embraced it. One reason is that they struggle with KM for operational excellence in the increasing administrative aspects of the academic’s role, rendering them time-poor in terms of KM for innovation in research and teaching. As a first step, we propose a self-defined sub-unit level customised view of the explicit knowledge artefacts provided at the organisational level i.e. a wiki for a school-based community of practice for administrative best practices

Knowledge management in an organisational climate of uncertainty and change: A longitudinal case study of an Australian university

Universities are in the knowledge business and are expected to be at the forefront of knowledge management (KM). However, KM in a university is complex given the diversity of stakeholder groups. This is exacerbated in the Australian context by the changing climate of rationalisation, corporatisation and marketisation universities faced in the past decade. This paper investigates KM strategies in an Australian university to uncover barriers to knowledge-sharing among academics. Although the organisational infrastructure supports KM, many academics have not actively embraced it. One reason is that they struggle with KM for operational excellence in the increasing administrative aspects of the academic’s role, rendering them time-poor in terms of KM for innovation in research and teaching. As a first step, we propose a self-defined sub-unit level customised view of the explicit knowledge artefacts provided at the organisational level i.e. a wiki for a school-based community of practice for administrative best practices

Digital information support for concept design

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers' working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored

Democratising Organisational Knowledge: The Potential of the Corporate Wiki

Attempts to impose knowledge management often ignore the vast organisational resource of workrelated tacit knowledge possessed by knowledge workers. Our research reveals that activities supported by social technologies such as Wikis, may provide a more appropriate capability for tacit knowledge management where a network centric focus is adopted. A corporate Wiki has the potential to engage the collective responsibilities of knowledge workers to transfer their collective experience and skills into a dynamic shared knowledge repository. However, the traditional organisational culture can be reluctant to allow this power shift which surrenders the monopolistic control of the few over the creation and management of organisational knowledge. In order to frame the theoretical perspectives of these new processes of creation, accumulation and maintenance of tacit knowledge in organisations, this paper uses Activity Theory to analyse the Wiki as a tool that mediates employee-based knowledge management activities leading to the democratisation of organisational knowledge

Open education: common(s), commonism and the new common wealth

Open Education, and specifically the Open Education Resources movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and increasing privatisation of the public education system. An important aspect of this movement is a reinvigoration of the concept of ‘the commons’. The paper examines this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education and the underlying notion of ‘the commons’ to the test of critical political economy. The paper acknowledges the radical possibility of the idea of ‘the commons’, but argues that its radical potentiality can be undermined by a preoccupation with ‘the freedom of things rather than with the freedom of labour’. The paper presents an interpretation of ‘the commons’ based on the concept of ‘living knowledge’ and ‘autonomous institutionality’ (Roggero, 2011), and offers the Social Science Centre in the UK, as an example of an ‘institution of the common’1. The paper concludes by arguing the most radical revision of the concept of ‘the common’ involves a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes social or common wealth

Collaborative Knowledge at the Grass-roots Level: the Risks and Rewards of Corporate Wikis

The open source movement is founded on the concept of democratising knowledge to freely collaborate and exchange information at the grass-roots level. As Wikis are philosophically grounded in this movement, the use of corporate Wikis in the collaborative creation and operation of knowledge management systems holds considerable potential. However, the impact of using corporate Wikis in the business environment has uncovered some challenging issues such as licensing, accountability and liability regarding copyright, which may require a change in the way we think about intellectual property and licensing in this connected world

Adoption and Use of Corporate Wikis in German Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

In recent years, corporate wikis have been increasingly adopted in enterprises. However, little research is devoted to theadoption and use of wikis in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are of high social and economic importance.The purpose of this paper is to examine the usage of enterprise wikis in SMEs and potential concerns that may hinder thediffusion of wikis in SMEs as well as other reasons for their reluctance to adopt wikis by conducting a survey of GermanSMEs. Findings indicate that a majority of SMEs do not intend to adopt wikis in their organization for various reasons.However, firms that have already introduced wikis seem to clearly benefit despite a number of concerns that might have anegative impact on the use and diffusion of wikis. Based on our results, we derive several implications for SMEs, inparticular with respect to how to overcome these obstacles to adoption and diffusion of wikis

Co-creating corporate knowledge with a Wiki

Wikis have a growing reputation on the open Internet for producing evolving stores of shared knowledge. However, such democratic systems are often treated with suspicion within corporations for management, legal, social, and other reasons. This article describes a field study of a corporate Wiki that has been developed to capture, and make available, organisational knowledge in a large manufacturing company as an initiative of their Knowledge Management (KM) program. As this approach to KM is a controversial and rapidly changing phenomenon, a Q Methodology research approach was selected to uncover employees- subjective attitudes to the Wiki. Activity Theory was used to provide a deeper interpretation of the findings of the Q-study. The results are enabling the firm to more fully exploit the potential of the Wiki as a ubiquitous tool for successful tacit and explicit knowledge management as more employees are encouraged to participate in a process of cocreating the store of corporate knowledge. The article also demonstrates how meaningful and rigorous research on this new democratic direction of corporate KM should continue

Eastwei: A Knowledge-Based Value Shop

Knowledge management (KM) has been the focus of comprehensive research over the last two decades, with particular attention paid to the related technology. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the embedding of KM into day-to-day business operations in order to mobilize resources and activities so as to create substantial value for customers. In this paper, we investigate knowledge management practices by applying the concept of the value shop to the case of Eastwei, a professional services firm in China. We explain how Eastwei functions as a Knowledge-based Value Shop (KBVS), creating and disseminating knowledge as it fulfils its obligations with clients. We find that guanxi, a fundamental concept for Chinese society that incorporates personal relationships and reciprocal obligations, plays a significant role in Eastwei’s KBVS arrangements. Given the importance of guanxi, we then discuss how we have set about developing a knowledge-centred strategic direction at Eastwei, drawing on both current knowledge sharing practices and the possibilities offered by instant messaging and wiki technologies