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Leveraging Collaborative Technologies for Sharing Tacit Knowledge: An Integrative Model
Abstract
Collaborative technologies (such as e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, discussion forums, groupware, etc.) seem uniquely positioned to assist in sharing knowledge within any organization, and between an organization and its environment. These technologies have the potential to help large, global organizations where their staff neither know who within the organization may have expertise that can solve their problems, nor have the opportunity to gather around a “water cooler” to share ideas and knowledge. A number of studies have looked at ways to make knowledge within an organization explicit and to share that explicit knowledge. Nevertheless, a large subset of knowledge within any organization is still not explicit, or is tacit in peoples’ heads. Organizations are eager to tap that tacit knowledge capital in the interest of the organization’s objectives, but current collaborative technologies have not met that challenge. Our research question is how to assess the potential of collaborative technologies for sharing tacit knowledge within an organization and what can be done to make the collaborative technologies effective “virtual water coolers” for organizations.
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