Yesterday, I attended my last exam in the second year of my Bachelor’s study where I defended the paper I have written with Kristoffer and Kristian on microblogging in organisations.
Everything went well; we got a good grade, but more importantly, our supervisor and examiner said the paper was very well written and had lots of good points, even though the coherence between the various parts of the paper is a bit vague at times. But what the heck? It’s over with, and we finished well.
The research question of the paper is as follows:
“How can an organisation facilitate tacit knowledge through a social media platform?”.
This is my executive summary of the paper:
“For this paper, we have interviewed prominent, Danish social media consultants, and applied relevant theory to try and find a solution to what is one of the crucial issues in organisations today; the tacit knowledge that is embodied in the members of the organisation, and might not be made explicit, without the aid of various tools.
The paper is divided into three sections, where the first one seeks to answer which kind of knowledge that can be embodied in a collaboration tool. We find that there a two kinds of tacit knowledge, where tacit knowing can not be articulated, and implicit knowledge is the knowledge which can be articulated, but has not yet. Moreover, when articulated, the knowledge loses the context in which it was situated, and becomes highly shareable information that can be shared through the organisation’s platform of choice.
Various social media platforms are investigated, in order for us to find which one is the most applicable for the retrieval of the Implicit Knowledge. We conclude that Instant Messaging is best for one-on-one interaction, but is lacking in features that makes the members of the organisation able to re-find their information. A wiki platform gives the user the ability to re-find the Implicit Knowledge that has been articulated, but the lack of social interaction makes it less useful for capturing the knowledge that is created throughout the day. As a result, we find that a microblogging platform acts as the best medium for the retrieval of Implicit Knowledge, as a tagging feature can be incorporated, in order for you to describe what your post is about, and then re-find it at a later point. Furthermore, because of the social nature of the microblogging platform, you are able to socialise with the other members of the organisation.
Lastly, we seek to give an answer to how an online community work, in order for us to better understand the social interactions that happen between the work-related issues in the microblog. This led us to a conclusion stating that because of the users’ interaction over social objects, they feel a form of being present together, even though they may be geographically dispersed.”
The whole paper can be found at Scribd: Link.
At a later point, I will put out the links to the blogposts and articles which can be found online that we have used in the paper, but for now, you will have to look at the bibliography at the end of the paper.
Many thanks goes out to especially Jacob Bøtter from Wemind, who helped us out by letting us interview him on his company’s use of WordPress’ Prologue-theme as an internal microblog. Also, thanks to Jon Froda and Anders Pollas from OurHoist, Henriette Weber Andersen Kristiansen from Toothless Tiger, Trine-Maria Kristensen from Social Square and Lennart Björneborn from The Royal Danish Library School for providing us with a yet-to-be published article on Serendipity.
So, if you managed to read through the paper (or parts of it anyway), what do you think; is it possible for teams/small organisations to actually extract some of that valuable information that forms inside their employees’ heads with the aid of a microblog?
Update:
Just found out that you can embed the paper into the blog post, so here it is: