Section I: Introduction
Imagine if someone were to turn off the electricity in an organization. There would be no light, climate control, communication and productivity would grind to a screeching halt. But there is another source of power that is not as visible but without it the company would be as lost as it would be without power - and that power is the flow of knowledge and expertise. Without an effective knowledge sharing and collaborative environment, the organizational power spike will simply become an electrical shortage.
The better the organization is at harnessing their employee’s knowledge as their energy source, the more successful they will become in keeping their competitive advantages in the aggressive market place. Companies must find a way to share knowledge, collaborate more efficiently and continually improve their processes to keep the knowledge grid operating at its maximum apex.
Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
The problem that I want to address at my workplace is how do I find information easily and effectively in one place? I spend countless hours toiling through the hundred of emails searching for answers that are archived somewhere in one of my folders or in someone else’s' brain. Because I work in a company has a global presence, there are times where I cannot simply pick up the phone to reach out to my United Kingdom's, Asia Pacific's counterparts in order to find what I'm looking for because they are unavailable. How can our organization extract this knowledge and place it in a system so that it can be found easily?
Human capital is the resources that each of our employees has available within their own mental and physical capacity. Currently, everyone at my company is working within their own areas of expertise. A co-worker working on a specific project, application or service has his or her own document repository and the only way we can have exposure to it is to ask the teammate for it. What if the co-worker leaves for vacation? Even worse, what if the teammate leaves the company abruptly? They would then take their intimate organizational knowledge with them and the company will lose that intellectual property for good unless there is a way to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration. Another reason for knowledge sharing is that it increases productivity through social capital. The resources I can "borrow" from others if I have good social and technical ties, multiplies the effectiveness of work.
Overarching Research Question:
"How do I improve and facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration in my company?"
There are three research cycles for my research project:
Research cycle one - If I implement a blog/forum and introduce it to my peers, would they contribute relevant information and knowledge so that it could accessible when needed?
Research cycle two - If I introduce a Wiki to our internal community of practice, would this further facilitate knowledge sharing?
Research cycle three - If I interviewed my team to find out what their thoughts were about our recent research cycles, what would I discover from these one on ones that would improve our SharePoint site so that the team would use the site more often?