Dissemination of Knowledge Management

The Dissemination of Knowledge Management

Hiroko Wilensky, David Redmiles, Norman Makoto Su

Department of Informatics University of California, Irvine Irvine, California 92697-3440, USA

{hwilensk, redmiles, normsu}@ics.uci.edu ABSTRACT

Our study on a community of knowledge management (KM) practitioners in the aerospace industry reveals challenges in the dissemination of KM concepts and tools. In this paper, we identify four reasons: (1) disparity of the community’s stated purpose and the actual motives of its members; (2) multidisciplinary nature of KM; (3) unique characteristics of the aerospace industry and its engineering culture and (4) adoption of preferred or recommended solutions provided by chosen reference groups rather than a grounded approach. In particular, we address the issues in promoting recommended ideas and tools by chosen reference groups in work organizations without fully understanding work practices. organizations. We pose the following question: why do practitioners face difficulties in disseminating KM despite their wishes and beliefs? Our aim in this paper is to expand on our past work and focus on the reasons for the practitioners’ continuous hardships in disseminating KM. Our first study [33] on the KM practitioners’ discourse revealed that despite the motivation to cultivate a community of practice for learning KM techniques, this forum instead became primarily a hub for legitimizing the KM discipline itself. Practitioners sought out a place for affirmation, validation and legitimization of their KM practices and for sharing their pain. For example, informants often noted that KM was relegated to a small team in a large company that had to face uphill battles against the prevailing aerospace engineering culture. One strategy they utilized was to promote their KM tools and practices as being “progressive.” Thus, a community can be far different from Lave & Wenger’s [16] communities of practice (CoP) model. The CoP model stresses...