Broker Networks: says who?

broker /'brəʊkə(r)/ n. 1 an agent who buys and sells for others; a middleman. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1990).

I think that the term “broker” is misleading, in that it connotes an independence which is not necessarily present in the literature, and which in turn enables stereotyping of the social identity of the broker (compare a money-sucking sycophant and a legitimate and beneficial part of the organisational process).

Cranefield and Yoong (2007) use the term “gatekeeper”: identified as a key person, typically a boundary spanner, who establishes information and communication networks, and filters and facilitates information transfer between an organisation and its environment. The gatekeepers in this study were managers or senior policy analysts from within the organisation, with domain knowledge and with the sanction and sanctioning force and mana of the government. MfO is regarded as a successful project, and much of the success can be attributed to domain knowledge, prior relationships and their ability to synthesise the different paradigms. These are skills and expertise that are not typically associated with external consultants.

Leow, Bleimann and Murphy (2004) attempt to introduce a “new paradigm” to resolve many IT problems involving communication: “communication between people”. A KB (knowledge broker) will identify experts, be available, have connections, will respond to information requests. In reality this is not a new paradigm, and the KB would previously have been called a librarian, also now known as an information professional. For example, the PWC's knowledge portal is presented as a KMS, yet it was developed by an information professional / librarian: Michelle Dollinger.

I am also not sure that Leow et al's knowledge broker network is a network in terms of Social Network Theory because it is the attributes of the individual that matters: the individual is identified as an expert, and the predisposition or ability to share knowledge affects the relationship – a well known problem in KM.

Cranefield, J. & Yoong, P. (2007). The role of the translator/interpreter in knowledge transfer environments. Knowledge and Process Management, 14(2), 95-103.

Loew, R., Bleimann, U. & Murphy, B. (2004). Knowledge broker network based on communication between humans.

Summary on : "A Research Agenda for the relationships between culture and knowledge management"

Full Title of article:

A Research Agenda for the Relationships between Culture and Knowledge Management.

Author: William R. King

Type of paper: A research agenda for analyzing the impact of culture to KM practices.

Audience: academic

This paper address the various concepts and levels of culture that are useful to research and practice in KM. The paper shows how national culture and organization culture affect the way people practice KM. The paper also discuss how KM impacts culture.

The main component of culture that this paper discuss is about national culture and organizational culture.

a. National Culture (NC)

What is NC?

This paper refers NC as 'The patters of enduring personality characteristics found among the population of nations'. Some of the themes of NC that the paper discuss are:

1. Uncertainty Avoidance : The degree to which individuals feels threatened by ambiguous situations by establishing formal rules and rejecting deviant ideas and behaviours.

2. Power of Distance: the power of influence that a subordinate perceives from a superior.

3. Masculinity/Femininity: Culture with high score in masculinity emphasize achievement, earnings, and assertiveness. Culture with high score in femininity favour personal goals, quality of life, and nurturance.

4. Individualism/Collectivism: It assess the the extend to which individuals' self-interest take priority over the concerns of the group.

How NC affect people do KM ?

National culture dominates the way people conduct knowledge management. The author thinks that if the organization culture is different that the national culture, eventually in the long run national culture will dominate they way the employee do KM.

b. Organizational Culture (OC)

What is OC ?

A single unified culture that exist in an organization.

How OC affect people do KM ?

1. Culture shapes assumptions about which knowledge is important.

2. Culture mediates the relationship between organizational and individual knowledge

3. Culture creates a context for social interaction.

4. Culture shapes processes for the creation and adoption of new knowledge.

5. Who owns the knowledge.

6. Culture create context for social interaction.

7. Culture shapes the processes for creation and adoption of new knowledge.

Rooney, D. and Mandeville, T. “The Knowing Nation: A framework for Pubic Policy in a post-industrial Knowledge Economy"

I read this article as part of my class 7 preparation and here is my summary and critique --

Summary: This article focuses on the role of government and policy makers in the historical background of post-industrial era and knowledge economy; it argues that a nation's government or policy makers should adopt a particular policy framework and use such framework to develop national policies on various aspects and drive the nation’s participation and development in the knowledge economy.

The authors argue that knowledge management and intellectual assets are crucial to a nation's competitiveness and its people's well-being in the current economic environment, and a nation's government and policy makers should take a leading role in promoting the growth and management of the nation's knowledge by making various national policies based on a knowledge-orientated framework.

The authors further specified three different levels that such national polices can have effects on:

1) Externally towards other countries – national policies are needed to drive internationalization and promote knowledge creation and learning from the wider world; this can be done through making policies of free trade, open global market, immigration and so on;

2) Internally within the nation – policy makers need to take a systematic view towards a nation's knowledge enterprises and facilitate individuals, governments, bureaucracy and industry to work towards the creation, dissemination, acquisition and processing of knowledge. This can be done through making policies regarding education, organizational cooperation, technology and innovation and so on;

3) At a personal level – national policies are needed to support the growth and utilization of individual's knowledge assets and competencies for the benefit of the community; such policies include appropriate education investment and employment policies as well as policies that aim to establish an open, free, democratic society where individuals can collaborate on knowledge creation and accept alternative views and ideas.

Critique: this article paints a rosy picture of a knowledge nation in and ideal world. It is logical to draw on organizational knowledge management literature and apply the same principles on a national level, however the authors didn't really describe or give much details of such public policy framework, or how such framework can be built or formulated. It also seems that this article was written purely from a knowledge management prespective rather than from a public policy prespective. Nevertheless this article takes a systematic view towards knowledge management at a national level; it connects and aligns national policy making with various aspects of knowledge economy and should be a good introductory paper on the topic of knowledge management and public policy.

Rooney, D. and Schneider, U. “The material, mental, historical and social character of knowledge.” In ...

Type of paper: concept paper, chapter in book about knowledge economies

Audience: academics

Focus: Explanation of knowledge or knowing to provide scaffolding with which to plan.

Summary: Identifies social constructivist and subjective paradigm as promising, but not enough. Better explanation is from evolutionary theory (Gebser and Mithen): underlying prelinguistic consciousness / intelligence remain basis of evolutionary developments: magic → mythic → modern, which thus still rely on imagination, intuition, analogy and metaphor, ie tacit knowing.

Knowledge is context dependent communication; knowing identifies gap and bridge building; a social process.

Rooney sets out a model of knowledge (p26):

1. Social-relational context: the social architecture in which knowing occurs.

2. Interpretive-relational context: sense-making.

3. The knower.

4. The situation: not only the personal, cognitive, sociological and phenomenological locations and shapers of knowledge, but also the historical, spatial and physical elements of knowledge systems, and beliefs, moods and attitudes.

5. Enactment of knowledge: fallibly intentional and directed use of knowledge, ie, it is messy, ir/rational, un/intentional.

Individual snapshots may appear random, but patterns over time may emerge. Knowledge management should not focus on outcomes, but on kawanatanga of the process and context of knowing.

Critique: While I have difficulty with evolutionary theories this one is persuasive. Many of these concepts are similar to Brenda Dervin's work, and familiarity is indicated through use of Dervin's terminology: sense-making, gaps, bridges. Rooney follows evolutionary theory with quote from Vygotsky, a social constructivist. Critical and phenomenological theory also have small parts to play within the model. Bhaskar appears to be a major influence. Key problems with the model are that it so big and has so many parts that the system is the model; and there are no measurements. Otherwise it is very appealing.

Wiig, K.M. (2007). Effective societal knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 11(5), 141-156.

Type of paper: Conceptual paper.

Audience: Academics and practitioners.

Focus: Nations must create societal knowledge management to enable and benefit its citizens; author suggests principles and framework.

Summary: Strong societal IC → effective participation in global knowledge economy, which is what all nations want. Knowledge is considered part of broader concept of intellectual capital and the terms are used interchangeably (p154).

Critique: This article places SKM as a holy grail of public administration and the panacea to all our woes. For example, it appears from Figure 2 and Wiig's commentary that increased literacy causes increased annual personal income, although I would suggest that both are caused by political stability, and only achieve high numbers when combined with established, government funded infrastructure.

Another difficulty I have is with Wiig's initial statement of limited government (p142):

The article emphasizes building competent people, profitable enterprises, effective cities, and desirable societies. Such developments result less from central planning and design – they primarily result from actions of people and organizations with detailed localized knowledge of needs and opportunities. Instead of specific prescriptions for how to build capabilities, the emphasis is on a knowledge-focused framework to foster environments, culture, and infrastructure.

Yet further on the government is required to provide literacy, education, effective cities, and national plans, social incentives (ie, tax breaks), best practices, R&D for national intellectual capital.

Other stand out points are that Wiig's utopia requires urbanisation, individual-based, western culture.

In the end the principles and frameworks suggested are (p151):

Hence SKM uses approaches developed and perfected in the private sector. Most management, organizational, and operational principles are similar. KM-related technology is also the same.

This assumes the private sector has perfected knowledge management.

This was written after NZ's “Knowledge Wave” programme, which was the government's attempt to emulate Ireland, and which hasn't made much impact.

Personal KM reading:“The Information Technology Workforce: Trends and Implications 2005-2008” (MIS Quarterly Executive, 2006, 5(2))

The article “The Information Technology Workforce: Trends and Implications 2005-2008” (MIS Quarterly Executive, 2006, 5(2)) is an empirical research conducted between May and October 2005. The research was a response to the changing requirements of IT workforce (in the face of global IT sourcing, baby-boomer retirements and etc) and meant to address the concern of potential mismatch between the academic supply of IT skills and the demand of business executives.

This empirical research sponsored by Society for Information Management (SIM) focused on the current and future needs for IT skills in IT departments of various organizations from a broad spectrum of industries. Half of the organizations participated in this research were in the Fortune 500, the other half of the organizations are made up evenly by large organizations and the Small and medium-size enterprises.

The key findings of this research are:
Most IT departments will increase staff level by 2008;
The skills required by organizations will be a mix of technical, project management and business skills;
External sourcing, especially offshore staff employed by domestic third party providers will increase by 2008;
Organizations use domestic third party providers to obtain technical skills which are mainly related to application and back office operation;
Organizations value IT workers with industry and business knowledge and who can solve business problems; technical foundation and communication skills are still important for entry-level IT workers.

This research also drew a list of implications for the future IT workers and their career paths; these implications may also be valuable to academics as they design and implement educational programs for the skill development of future IT workers. These implications include:

IT professionals will have more experiences with third party providers;
As outsourcing of entry level IT work increases, organizations may need to find new approaches to developing the combination of IT, project management and business skills; it may be easier for internal employees with business skills to pick up IT knowledge than the other way around;
Some organizations continue to depend on mainframes for their businesses, future IT workers may still need to develop mainframe skills; regarding mainframe technology, academics and the organizations may need to join force to create solutions for the future.
More alignment between IT education providers and the business world are needed to define how, when and where future IT professional will develop the range of skills required by organizations, especially business and project management skills.

This article highlighted the needs of adjustment for personal knowledge strategy of knowledge workers. It emphasized that personal knowledge management and personal career development plan need to be constantly adjusted to respond to the changing business requirements. The acquisition, development and measurements of personal knowledge and experiences need to start from an appropriate identification of knowledge and skill requirements, which are often from the business of the industry and influenced by changing economic factors. The future knowledge workers, including IT professionals, needs to establish their personal knowledge goals and strategies and also revisit and adjust them according to the change of business requirements in their industry.

SUMMARY OF: A REVIEW OF CULTURE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH: TOWARD A THEORY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CULTURE CONFLICT

Dorothy E. Leidner and Timothy Kayworthy (2006). MIS Quarterly Vol 30 No.2 pp. 357-399

The goal of this paper is to:

• Examine the impact of national, organizational, and subunit culture to IT
• Examine how IT impacts culture within a group by examining implications and causes on three types of conflicts that happens when organization implements IT.
  

IMPACT OF CULTURE TO IT

The paper review how different culture taxonomies impacts IT. Some of those taxonomies are:

Taxonomy 1. Uncertainty Avoidance : The degree to which members of a society feel comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.

The author findings on this aspect of culture:

Cultures low in uncertainty avoidance had lower perception of project risk than cultures high in uncertainty avoidance.

Taxonomy 2. Power Distance: The extend to which members of a society accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed equally.

The author findings on this aspect of culture:
Successful adoption of IT is more likely to occur in a low power-distance cultures.

Taxonomy 3. Individualism vs. Collectivist: The preference for a social framework where individuals take care of themselves (individualism) as opposed to be collectivism where individuals expect a group to take care of them in exchange for their loyalty.

The author findings on this aspect of culture:
Groups with high power distance and collectivist using Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) achieved a greater degree of reduction in harmful status influence effects than group with low power distance and individualist.

Taxonomy 4. Solidarity and Sociability: The degree to which an organization's members pursue shared objectives quickly and effectively regardless of personal ties (solidarity). The tendency toward sincere friendliness among members of a community (sociability).

The author findings on this aspect of culture: organization low in sociability and high solidarity has a higher IT adoption.

IMPACT OF IT TO CULTURE

The author of the paper examines the impacts that IT implementation brings to an organizations by examining three types of conflicts:

Conflict 1. System Conflict
System conflict emerges when the values implicit in a specific IT contradicts the values held by the group members using, or expected to use, the system.

The author observe the following causes and implications on system conflict:

1. The greater the cultural distance between the group responsible for championing the IT and the group adopting the IT, the greater the system conflict experienced by the group adopting the IT.
2. The greater the breadth of IT implementation across groups, the greater the system conflict by the organization.
3. The greater the system conflict experienced by a group, the less likely the group is to be a forerunner in the adoption of the system.
4. The greater the system conflict experienced by a group, the greater the modification of use to support the group’s values .

Conflict 2. Contribution Conflict

Contribution Conflict is defined as the contradiction between group member values and the group's IT values. Contribution conflicts does not involve the use of a specific IT, but more to the IT management and strategy rather than IT development, adoption, use and outcome.

The author observe the following cause and implications with contribution conflict:

1. The lower the contribution conflict by the most powerful actors within a group, the lower the contribution conflict experienced by the group.
2. The lower the contribution conflict in a group to which another group aspires, the lower the contribution conflict in the aspiring group.
3. The greater the contribution conflict experienced by a group, the less strategic a role that IT will play in that group.
4. The greater the contribution conflict experienced by a group, the less likely the innovation uses of IT by the group.
   

Conflict 3. Vision Conflict

Vision conflict is defined as contradiction between values embedded in a system and a group's IT values. It is important to understand the system values are values that are embedded in the IT system by the IT champion. The group's IT value refers to the values of the user who is using the IT system.

The authors observe the following cause and implications from vision conflict:

1. The greater the difference in the IT values between the champion group and the user group the greater the vision conflict experience by the user group.
2. The lesser the involvement of the most powerful within a user group in development, the greater the vision conflict experienced by the user group.
3. The higher the vision conflict a group has with respect to a system, the lower the adoption rate of the system by the group.
4. The greater the vision conflict by a group the greater the potential change to the group's IT values.

The author also observe that managers can reduce all forms of conflict by promoting shared IT values. The emergence and resolution of the three types of conflict will, over time, result in cultural change of the organization.