KNOWLEDGE SHARING and COLLABORATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA - the CASE of IBM Fahd Omair Zaffar Göteborgs Universitet, [email protected]
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) Association for Information Systems AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems MCIS 2012 Proceedings (MCIS) 2012 KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND COLLABORATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA - THE CASE OF IBM Fahd Omair Zaffar Göteborgs Universitet, [email protected] Ahmad Ghazawneh Jönköping International Business School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/mcis2012 Recommended Citation Zaffar, Fahd Omair and Ghazawneh, Ahmad, "KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND COLLABORATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA - THE CASE OF IBM" (2012). MCIS 2012 Proceedings. 28. http://aisel.aisnet.org/mcis2012/28 This material is brought to you by the Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (MCIS) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in MCIS 2012 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact [email protected]. KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND COLLABORATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA - THE CASE OF IBM Fahd Omair Zaffar, Department of Applied IT, Chalmers | Göteborgs Universitet, Forskningsgången 6, SE-412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden, [email protected] Ahmad Ghazawneh, Jönköping International Business School, Gjuterigatan 5, 553 18 Jönköping, Sweden, [email protected] Intellectual capital is the single most important asset owned by any organization. Business continuity, innovation, and long-term sustainability of Small Medium Enterprises depend partly on accumulated organizational knowledge. Knowledge is hard to capture and manage due to its implicit nature. This paper seeks to investigate how Web 2.0 technologies are being used to overcome knowledge sharing and collaboration issues. The new web technologies, which are based on platforms, are referred to as emergent social software platforms (ESSP’s). The use of ESSP’s within a business enterprise to achieve business goals is known as enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). Central to this research is the proposed knowledge sharing cycle model, which has three main stages - internalization, externalization, and objectification. This model is adapted based on the findings of a case study of IBM Corporation. The findings indicate that ESSP’s can be used to support knowledge sharing practices and to help convert knowledge into its different forms. Keywords: Social Media, Knowledge Sharing, Mass Collaboration, Web 2.0, E 2.0, and ESSP 1 INTRODUCTION Collaboration is so common in today’s society. It is proven powerful for solving problems, building consensus, and helping decision-making processes (Straus and Layton, 2002). Historically, collaboration has been governed through collaboration hierarchies, where every member is controlled and supervised by other top members, employees are dominated by managers, and customers are controlled by organizations (Tapscott and Williams, 2006). However, through new technologies, new scientific initiatives and new forms of collaboration emerge in the global market, predominantly initiated by communities and self-organizing agents. This form of collaboration, referred herein as mass collaboration (Tapscott and Williams, 2006), enabled by the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies (O’Reilly, 2005), has led organizations to rethink their methods of managing and distributing information, and creating business value. Furthermore, mass collaboration challenges many mature and established firms such as BMW, Boeing, and Procter & Gamble to rethink their collaboration activities (Tapscott and Williams, 2006). This was emphasized by the surprisingly high and increasing number of firms adopting Web 2.0 technologies and services (Libert and Spector, 2008), which help these organizations create new and unique collaborative environments (McAfee, 2006). Its adoption is expanding especially for corporate affairs (Grossman and McCarthy, 2007; Hideo and Shinichi, 2007) so that organizations can improve their products and services or solve an intractable problem (Tapscott, 2008). Previous research works indicate that social media tools like wikis are increasingly becoming popular for managing knowledge and collaboration within enterprises. Some studies have contributed to this field by creating awareness among organizations about the benefits of using ESSP’s for knowledge creation. The concept of Enterprise 2.0 is quite young. Researchers argue that intellectual capital is the biggest asset of any organization and serves as the greatest source of power (Druker, 1993; Toffler, 1990; Quin, 1992). These authors agree that the future belongs to those who are endowed with knowledge (Nonaka, 1996). We live in a knowledge-driven world, which therefore makes the “knowledge worker” the greatest single asset (Druker, 1993). One of the most popular management concepts developed over the past few decades is knowledge management (Huysman, 2002). Researchers and practitioners confirm that knowledge sharing improves organizational performance (Lesser & Storck, 2001). Often, organizations do not realize what they know. Locating and retrieving knowledge within organizations can be problematic (Huber, 1991). IT is used as an enabler in most knowledge management initiatives (Alavi & Leidner, 2001). The research question this paper aims to answer therefore is- How is social media being used within an organization to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration to achieve an objectified knowledge? Though the problem focuses around knowledge sharing, more emphasis is placed on ESSP’s. This paper covers only the ESSP’s which are applied and used in the case study The body of this paper is organized into seven sections. Section two discusses the literature on IT tools for knowledge sharing and collaboration among peers. Sections three and four state the theoretical basis and research methodology, respectively. Meanwhile, section five explains the social media strategy adopted by International Business Machines (IBM) in Sweden. Our analysis of the case is presented in section six while the last section draws out the conclusion and recommendations for future research. 2 RELATED LITERATURE 2.1 Wikinomics and the Mass Collaboration Mass collaboration happens when many participants work independently yet collaboratively in a single project. These projects are often modular in nature. They execute tasks, generate solutions (e.g. InnoCentive), or create new knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia). Mass collaboration is said to owe its success to its decentralized model of collaboration which outperforms more centrally controlled collaboration models (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2006). Mass collaboration is characterized by four main principles introduced by Tapscott and Williams (2006) - peering, sharing, openness and acting globally. Peering, or peer production, is allowing users to participate in the creation and development of products and services, and coactively share, classify, and rate contents that enhance the production (Tapscott and Williams, 2006; McKercher and Mosco, 2007;Wilkinson, 2008). Meanwhile, sharing, considered as one of the distinctive features of mass collaboration, simply refers to sharing knowledge. It creates new opportunities for development. Tim Bray, the director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, said “we genuinely believe that radical sharing is a win-win for everyone; expanding markets create new opportunities” (ibid, 2006, p.27). Openness, according to Tapscott and Williams (2006), refers to having boundaries that are porous to external solutions, ideas, and knowledge. Being open to outside human capital outperforms companies that rely on their internal resources and capabilities. This type of openness is associated with “candour, transparency, freedom, flexibility, expansiveness, engagement, and access” (p.21). Lastly, acting globally or making mass collaboration projects available on the Internet through Web 2.0 technologies enables firms to access new ideas and solutions by engaging more innovative and open-minded users around the world. While traditional collaboration is mainly dedicated to people sharing common interests, goals, abilities, and areas of expertise, mass collaboration in contrast finds its way to a large number of individuals from various knowledge areas, with diverse interests expertise, and specializations (Tapscott and Williams, 2006; Panchal and Fathianathan, 2008; Libert and Spector, 2008). An example of a successful mass collaboration project is Wikipedia, an online collaborative encyclopedia that attracts millions of internet users from all over the world. Wikipedia enables users to view, create, edit, or remove articles in different subjects. This project currently has about 10 million volunteers contributing 9.5 million articles in 256 languages (Panchal and Fathianathan, 2008, p.1). Another example is InnoCentive, a mass collaboration project that is specifically created for the global community. Its main goal is to allow researchers, scientists, engineers, inventors, R&D groups, and companies to collaborate to achieve solutions for research and development problems in a broad range of disciplines like chemistry, biology, engineering, math, computer science, entrepreneurship, and others (Tapscott and Williams, 2006; Harrison and Sullivan, 2006; Lakhani et al.,2007; Dodgson et al., 2008; Libert and Spector, 2008). This project attracts more than 80,000 independent problem solvers from more than 150 countries (Lakhani