Infrastructure for Collaborative Working and Knowledge Sharing: A Human Perspective

Infrastructure for Collaborative Working and Knowledge Sharing: A Human Perspective

A/Professor Pak Yoong
School of Information Management
Victoria University
Wellington

Abstract:

The need to create, store and share knowledge among employees has become one of the key strategies for organizational survival in today's fast changing global environment. If these organisations can adapt that knowledge to enhance product or process innovations, then they are likely to gain an advantage over their business competitors. In order to achieve these competitive gains, many organisations have adopted knowledge management as a means of leveraging on what they already know and do well.

However, many successful organisations have also found that knowledge management is more than just designing technological infrastructure, distributing reports or integrating organizational databases. They have identified ways of promoting activities that create and share knowledge among different groups of key workers - knowledge that is unique and relevant for the groups that created and used it. This presentation describes the 'human' aspects of collaborative working and knowledge sharing and outlines a number of 'online knowledge sharing' research projects that are currently in progress at Victoria University of Wellington.