As organizations increasingly depend on knowledge and information technology as assets to innovate and create value, academics and management thought leaders have directed their attention to understanding and practicing knowledge management--creating a "learning organization" or a "knowing organization" is viewed as the only sustainable competitive advantage in a fast-paced and fast-changing technical environment.
It's pretty clear to many of us that all enterprise functions--including the efforts to "manage knowledge"--are changing as a result of the increasingly rich social media (SM) environment. Moreover, the incoming "digital natives" are using social media in ways their older baby boomer colleagues have never considered...and this can result in tensions in an organization. Consider the ease of exchange of knowledge:
- On the one hand, SM offers unprecedented opportunities for sharing information and knowledge both among colleagues closely bound by shared interests but also among those representing the "strength of weak ties" (Granovetter, 1973)--those with whom we seldom interact.
- On the other hand, SM, because of the ease with which information can be disseminated, threatens organizational control of information and increases the risk of the loss of intellectual property and proprietary knowledge.
How are companies to respond to this tension? The answer, of course, is that it depends on several factors--e.g., the management style of the CEO, the nature of the industry and the customers, the nature of the competitive environment, ... Many companies have responded with policies and technical barriers to shut down access at the workplace to all SM sites. This may not be the best answer (and probably not even an enforceable one, given the prevalence of smart phones and laptops). Many CEOs and CIOs find themselves in a dilemma--they recognize that they are unprepared with their current organizational structures to deal with how the younger generation works. As one CEO told us:
... we realize that there are so many different outside challenges that we would just be too slow with hierarchic[al] reactions..."
To examine these issues in more depth, we are holding a special mini-track (KM & SM) at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, and we're asking for submissions for these sessions. We're interested in how firms are dealing with the tensions for KM created by SM (case studies), and we're particularly interested in papers that combine conceptual models with empirical findings. The deadline is June 15. See the call for papers for details. [Authors interested in going further with their paper may want to submit an expanded version for a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce. Details for this special issue are here.]