Special topics assessment
Part one
Microblogs and knowledge management
The knowledge-based theory of the firm suggests that knowledge is the Organizational asset that enables sustainable competitive advantage in hypercompetitive environments (Alavi & Leidner, 1999). Many organizations are developing information systems designed specifically to facilitate the sharing and integration of knowledge.
Microblogs are a smaller version of blogs where a blogger can only post 140 characters per post. The most popular Microblog is Twitter. On Twitter people post up short messages and follow their favourite stars and organisations. (Educause.edu, 2009).
This review talks about the problems and advantages experienced when using Microblogs for knowledge management. This study focuses on twitter. Firstly, this review discusses the benefits with using MicroBlogging for knowledge management. Secondly, the problems with using MicroBlogging for knowledge management and finally, weigh up the benefits and problems. Also the writer will give his or her take on these issues mentioned above.
KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices (Srinivas & Coordinator).
One of the benefits of using MicroBlogging for knowledge management such as twitter is that it is short and to the point. This allows for knowledge to be stored quickly and on the go. Companies can use this sort of system where they can store valuable information and also use it as a reference point for when they need the previously stored information. For organisations, it could bring a lot of benefits to the company, sharing of Ideas on the go and in some cases it can even save company travelling expenses.
In today’s business environment, knowledge has emerged as the most valuable corporate asset and deserves to be managed as such. Managing knowledge is about the information your company possesses and the people, who increase the value this by adding experience, knowledge and associations in order to produce new insights. This cycle continues endlessly and the companies who succeed in organizing and using this flow will be the winners of tomorrow.
IT tools can extend knowledge networks and make it easier to find information and people who have the knowledge you seek this is where Microblogs come in. Further, IT tools can leverage the value of information by providing structure, perspective and access to otherwise unstructured information.
According to (Cominteli, 2012), Knowledge Management (KM) software tool should be able to automatically:
● Retrieve information from any source, internal or external.
● Filter and structure incoming information into taxonomies.
●Accept manual information input using intuitive interfaces.
● Alert users according to their preferences.
● Mix information about people and information so that the knowledge available is transparently searchable.
● Provide different ways of searching, browsing and presenting information in order to suit different users.
Having mentioned above the uses of a knowledge management system, twitter can do most of them but not without any short comings of which we will look at in the following sections where we discuss the problems associated with using Microblogs for knowledge management.
The problems experienced with using Microblogs especially twitter for knowledge management is depth of the knowledge stored. Some argue that the 140 character limit does not allow for the complete conversation or does not allow the user to follow and make sense of what the other person is trying to communicate.
For the organisation to be able to store knowledge on a Microblog it would be to employ an in-house MB because twitter is so public and one of the problems is security especially with company information. Another problem is the effect on the productivity of the company, employees will tend to be lazy, (Riemer, Richter, & Seltsikas, 2010) suggests that all the behaviours associated with social networking will be imported into the workplace if the organisation adopts the Microblog like twitter. This study concluded that the culture of the organisation plays a very important role on whether this will be the case for the company or not. Also trust, employees have to trust their employees to do the work without any disruptions. If the employees know and get the sense that they are trusted it becomes easy for them to behave.
In terms of getting quality information, this depends on who you follow (Ben-Ari, 2009). Many people follow you if they read your tweets and see that they add value. Also this depends on the number of Retweets, this shows that the information you are posting is useful.
My opinion is that yammer is a great MicroBlogging tool for businesses that don't want the information to leave the company since only users with company email address can access your messages. In using MicroBlogs for knowledge management especially in organisations is that they should
Conclusion
We have mentioned the benefits and problems associated with using MicroBlogging for knowledge management. MicroBlogging is truly a great tool to use for knowledge management. Even though there are shortcomings associated with it, the benefits offered by MicroBlogging seem to outweigh the disadvantages. I would suggest that companies develop their own in-house Microblogs in order to define policies and procedures to govern the enterprise Microblog system.
References
Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (1999). Knowledge management systems: issues, challenges, and benefits. Commun. AIS, 1(2es), 1.
Ben-Ari, E. (2009). Twitter: What's All the Chirping About? BioScience, 59(7), 632.
Cominteli. (2012). Enteprise information access software.
Educause.edu. (2009). 7 things you should know about...
Microblogging, from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7051.pdf
Riemer, K., Richter, A., & Seltsikas, P. (2010). Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS)
AMCIS 2010 Proceedings
Srinivas, H., & Coordinator, G. What is knowledge management?
Some definitions, from http://www.gdrc.org/kmgmt/what-is-km.html
Part 2
Knowledge management mining on MicroBlogs
Mining text information is not an easy task. Text data is ill-structured and hence proper tools are required. In addition, the amount of data produced by the bloggers and other content producers are usually dynamic and this makes text mining a challenging task indeed (Hoong+, Lim, & Aun, 2011).
Knowledge mining on MicroBlogs such as twitter is made easy by the use of tags, even though sometimes they are not accurate, for example, the use of #tags does not help since it brings all the tweets for a member of the list even personal ones that have nothing to do with the topic you are mining. My experience when I was searching for how to store useful information I found that by using #tag #private Info for example imported many tweets, those that were with and without the tags. I found many people that belong to the UKZN2012 list were all shown with all their tweets. This made it difficult for me to follow the conversation and get all the information I needed on how to store my private information such as passwords. Since # Tags are manually typed by the user this means they are not always accurate. I think that lists are as far as you can go in terms of filtering information. Also you can use the twitter search feature, by typing the person’s name; you get all that person’s tweets. I think that the fact that MicroBlogs can store information on the go, it assumes that it will be needed or accessed at an equal amount of speed that is why there is only 3200 tweets history available. The limit of 3200 tweets, that is as far as you can go in terms of mining, the rest of all the tweets is lost
Traditional knowledge management
Compared to MicroBlogs, data mining in traditional knowledge management is much more cumbersome, it is not easy to get what you are looking for on the traditional knowledge management systems, for example, a journal article or a book. It is very difficult to extract information from traditional knowledge management tool like journal articles; you have to read pages and pages of information in order to find what you are looking for. However the accessibility to the information is easy with traditional knowledge management systems. MicroBlog mining for knowledge is more effective than traditional knowledge management tools. The information will always be found where the original author wrote it even after years have passed.
MicroBlogs such as Twitter have many things that people say on them, a quick way of dropping a message that you are still alive, Sites like Twitter have fast become a quick way to spread information very quickly worldwide. The interesting side of this is the human element, what people are saying about a company or a person. This makes sites like these one of the best sources for mining of information.
MicroBlogging is one of the most popular social networks that people are using to post information on the internet. These MicroBlogging sites have lot of data that can be mined and transformed into more meaningful information. The data on these sites can be simply pulled into a central repository since the information might be tagged. While this is a good approach, it relies on the end-user to tag their content correctly, accurately and in a timely manner. Tagging approaches require the user to do something to allow their knowledge contribution to be categorized, indexed and found by aggregation systems and other users.
One can use Twitter's search to locate all tweets that mention a person's name. Even if the person doesn't have a Twitter account, but is being discussed on Twitter, such a search will yield results. Twitter's advanced search also lets you locate messages from and/or to specific people; for this, you need to specify the individuals' Twitter usernames.
However there are problems associated with using these filtering features, firstly it relies on user accuracy in terms of typing it manually. Other posts are not tagged and this makes it very difficult to dig for information on a certain topic. I found lists useful but only up to a certain extent. Some posts you find that there are no links in terms of the source of information.
The language that is used on traditional knowledge management is not shortened for example SMS language. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage; firstly it makes it easy to follow the conversation since it is written in full sentences. But it turns to be time consuming especially in during this generation. I personally do not read long writings especially on social networks. If someone posts a long status on Facebook I do not read it. My point is that short messages are much straight forward and to the point. You get the information you are looking for much faster and you are able to make sense of it and understand it easily.
Conclusion
Knowledge mining in MicroBlogs is easier and more efficient. Traditional knowledge management mining however is still useful because it provides dept of the knowledge and it is durable knowledge that you can have access to. But in this fast paced rapidly dynamic and competitive business environment, businesses are moving away from traditional knowledge mining and are adopting
References
Hoong+, A. L. S., Lim, T. M., & Aun, J. L. R. (2011). Yammer: A Study on Knowledge Sharing using Enterprises Microblogging System.