1 - Introduction and overview

Summary

In an information economy, organizations compete on the basis of their ability to acquire, manipulate, interpret and use information effectively.

(McGee and Prusak 1993, p. 1)

While we will consider various knowledge transfer issues and strategies…many of them come down to finding effective ways to let people talk and listen to one another.

(Davenport and Prusak 1998, p. 88)

Building competitive advantage involves creating and acquiring new knowledge, disseminating it to appropriate parts of the firm, interpreting and integrating it with the existing knowledge and ultimately using it to achieve superior performance…

(Turner and Makhija 2006, p. 197)

The grand challenge is knowing what to deliver to whom using what mode when and how quickly.

(Satyadas, Harigopal, and Cassaigne 2001, p. 436)

The information context of the modern organization is rapidly evolving. Information technologies, including data bases, new telecommunications systems, and software for synthesizing information, make a vast array of information available to an ever expanding number of organizational members. Management's exclusive control over knowledge is steadily declining, in part because of the downsizing of organizations and the decline of the number of layers in organizational hierarchies. These trends make our understanding of informal communication networks, particularly those focusing on interpersonal relationships, the human side of knowledge management (KM), increasingly critical for understanding organizations. Knowledge is inherently social, with knowledge networks (KN) linked to innovation, learning, and performance (Swan 2003).