I just learned about this at the Fall meeting of the Coalition of Networked Information.  It's the brainchild of historians at George Mason University to bring into the web browser environment holistic support of the information gathering and assimilation process.  It's open source, emulates the iTunes interface and presents and interactive environment seamless to how we are increasingly behaving in the web environment.  It's very exciting.  Check out the Demo!

Writing a dissertation seems like a long and arduous journey.  Most of us are only at the beginning of such a journey.  This current book looks like a good guide to help us plan the trip so that it is not as hard. I hope that I will be able to be like the second case study guy and not like the first case study person who hurt his family and career life to get his disseration done because he did not have a plan. I am not sure that I am ready to develop a plan for a dissertation yet, but this is defintely a good idea.

I found the three editorials a very interesting set of documents. They are a great tie back to the first couple sessions of class. These memos represent many different things to me: 1.) These editors want to send a message about how they plan on running the journal, just as an inauguration speech from a President at the beginning of his term wants to set the tone. 2.) They are also setting up some rules and provide some insight into what it will take to get published in their journal. 3.) It again impresses the fact that the collection of authors, reviewers, and editors of this journal and the others are THE authorities and credibility watchers of our field. 3.) At least in these three memos, there is a fair share of glad-handing. There seems to be a lot of mutual admiration going on. 4.) That being said, they are very serious about their job. There are no free passes into the Quarterly. Rigor, scrutiny, and validity are not taken lightly.

The editor-in-chief of MISQ in 1998, Bob Zmud, wrote this monograph or commentary on journal refereeing in order to  encourage more scholars to participate in the refereeing process, and to give referees suggestions on how to produce quick, useful reviews. The editor feels that not enough people volunteer to referee papers, reviews cycles are taking too long, and referees are often too critical of the papers they review.  Zmud offers suggestions for giving better, faster, and useful reviews. 

The editor-in-chief of MISQ in 1999, Allan Lee, wrote a monograph of how IT plays a role in the manuscript review process.  He points out that while IT plays a role in speeding up certain parts of the process, the human review has the biggest impact for a timely and quality review.  The timeline of an actual review that he did truly gives me an appreciation of the whole process.

The editor-in-chief of MISQ in 2005, Carol Saunders, wrote a monograph to find new sources for reviewers and to encourage  reviewers to do “developmental reviewing” rather than “gatekeeper reviewing” to increase the publication acceptance rate. She uses the metaphor of reviewers as skilled diamond cutters to turn rough manuscripts into gems.  Now I have a better appreciation of all the articles we have read this past semester – not all papers are perfect and they are gems with minor flaws that make a contributions to the field that we can learn from.

Bock et al. bring together what I think some of us were hoping to see in the Pawlowski and Robey article. First, this article was actually based on theory, to be exactly the theory of reasoned action (TRA). From what I have gathered in a short lookup in addition to is description of the reading, TRA's purpose is to show that a person's intention is the product of his/her attitude towards a behavior and the norms associated with the behavior. Second, this article has emperical substance that crosses organizational, industy, genders, and functions.

I appreciated the fact that they acknowledge that still more rigorous resear needs to be done, and I don't disagree. There were of course some limiting factors, particularly with regards to the staying in the same culture with such strong nationalistic links.

In “Behavior Intention Formation in Knowledge Sharing”, Bock et al proves the case of knowledge hoarding and sharing in 27 Korean organizations.  I believe that the attitude of knowledge hoarding and sharing is a human nature and so Bock et al’s empirical study can be applied in any other cultures or organizations.  I also believe that it is even more important to further study individuals’ knowledge-sharing intentions in IT workers. There are many reasons for IT workers to refuse sharing knowledge.  In “Personal Belief Structures”, Bock et al points out that not only an individual stands to lose unique value and position within an organization., but “any knowledge shared that is subsequently judged to be unsound or irrelevant can damage his/her reputation”.  This is so particularly true in information technology where today’s knowledge becomes obsolete tomorrow.  It is also observed that the relevancy of IT knowledge is averaging about every two years.  Therefore, an effective IT knowledge sharing system must be updated to reflect the changes of the technologies within that timeframe.

As corporations are becoming more dependent on cellular phones, the Internet and its own virtual private networks, it is often the case that knowledge sharing, whether voluntarily or not, is the main act that usually occurs within the last two weeks after a knowledge worker gives resignation notice.  Until a replacement worker is found, another worker is “nominated” to sit down with the departed workers for “knowledge sharing”.  In many cases, many years of experience and practices are “transferred” in just a matter of a few hours.  The complexity and the skill levels of both the sender and the receiver are often overlooked and underplayed.  In most cases, the sender of the knowledge will act in good manner to retain favorable images in the remaining weeks.  It is the responsibility of the receiver to improvise the knowledge after the fact, as much as possible.

In many organizations, not until a point where major impacts of knowledge lacking are struck and felt, knowledge sharing is often placed in the back burners.  Management has the tendency to believe that either (a) the required knowledge can be easily obtained within the touch of a few telephone buttons or (b) the requirements can be delayed until the needed resources become available.  While this behavior can be tolerated from times to times, it is not a method of solving problem in disastrous situations.  Managers are often caught off-guard when they don’t have a plan that contains specific instructions for business continuity.
 
The issue of knowledge sharing might have been overshadowed by the claims of consistently improvements on worker productivity over the recent years.  Perhaps the productivity gains are due to the decreased and possible eliminations of the redundancy roles of knowledge workers.  In the field of information technology, a few CIOs are already alarmed and concerned with the nature of specializations within the field of IT.  They believe that the expertise of IT workers are so narrowed as in some areas, only one or two individuals who have unique skills and knowledge can be called upon to solve specific problems.  In short, while knowledge sharing is obviously needed in those organizations, workers are often being stretched too thin and often overloaded; hence knowledge sharing is impossible to carry out effectively.

Wow.  This is a heavy read.  And lots to think about.  

I don't know why I thought Simon was from Britain.  I was halfway through Chapter 3 when I checked out the back cover and saw the man's credentials.  Pretty interesting.  He's a professor of Computer Science and Psychology with a Nobel Prize in Economics.  That's what I call a Renaissance Man.  

I have been most impressed with Chapter 3 so far.  The comparison of human activity with those of an ant trying to get back into the anthill gave me pause for reflection.  I'm not sure if I would completely agree with Simon on that one point, but it is an interesting point of view.  

Tomorrow (Monday), I'm going to be teaching a little lesson on encryption in my CalPoly Extension class – at the request of the students.  I think I'm going to use his DONALD+GERALD=ROBERT cryptarithmetic example to confound the class – both of them!  That was a really interesting little exercise in testing one's problem solving creativity.  

I find it also interesting in Chapter 4, where Simon is approaching Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory  challenges like he is designing a new chip!  There are obvious parallels in the architectures and I believe, perhaps wrongly, that we tend to design machines that act like we do, if they don't always look like we do.  So perhaps eventually we (humans) will design and build CPUs that behave more and more like the real human mind.  

I just hope we give them a nice personality;-)  

I'm almost done reading the whole book, but know that I wont't have time to post by blog entry before I finish. So here are my thoughts so far.  Although I think the book was often hard to follow, I think Herbert Simon is a genius. He somehow combined, cognitive psychology with econonomics with engineering and with computer science.  I find his analogies and explanations to pull all these together very fascinating.  I still find some of his discussion about theories and articficial systems a little confusing.  

This is a pretty interesting subject that Gee-Woo Bock, Robert Zmud, Young-Gul Kim, and Jae-Nam Lee have studied empirically for us.  How is knowledge transferred from person to person within an organization?  What motivates the transference and the transferors?  

Bock et al have used the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) as the framework for their investigation.  I had to look this one up, as usual for me.  TRA, as it turns out, is a way of studying behaviors in terms of the attitudes towards behaviors. The current TRA framework was developed by a couple of guys named Fishbein and Ajzen in the late 1960s.  From my research, it looks like TRA has been used for a lot of behavioral prediction and control work, including marketing.  Fancy that.  

Another thing I found interesting that I need to validate, is Bock's (et al) definition of knowledge management as "the process of capturing, storing, sharing, and using knowledge", where Bock et al reference Davenport and Prusak's work from 1998.  

Since this is a holiday weekend, I'll make this pretty short.  

The unexpected result of Bock's (et al) study is that extrinsic motivators, like pay raises or promotions, actually impede the transfer of knowledge from person to person within organizations that they studied.  So, the willingness of an individual to transfer knowledge to his or her colleagues comes essentially from within, depending on how it makes them feel about themselves and how they perceive their colleagues feel about them.  I realize that the culture they conducted the study in was Korean, but I think it might translate pretty well to nearly everywhere else in the world.  

I think Bock et al could have included some graphical data representations for their data.  LIsts of numbers are not really meaningful for me.  I like to see charts and graphs, especially when a data analysis method like Partial Least Squares is used.  

Overall, I thought it was a pretty interesting study.  It contradicted what I would intuitively would believe motivates transference of knowledge within an organization.