Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management

by Mark S. Ackerman (editor)

The field of knowledge management focuses on how organizations can most effectively
store, manage, retrieve, and enlarge their intellectual properties. The repository view of knowledge
management emphasizes the gathering, providing, and filtering of explicit knowledge. The information
in a repository has the advantage of being easily transferable and reusable. But it is not easy to
use decontextualized information, and users often need access to human experts.This book describes a
more recent approach to knowledge management, which the authors call "expertise sharing." Expertise
sharing emphasizes the human aspects--cognitive, social, cultural, and organizational--of knowledge
management, in addition to information storage and retrieval. Rather than focusing on the management
level of an organization, expertise sharing focuses on the self-organized activities of the
organization's members. The book addresses the concerns of both researchers and practitioners,
describing current literature and research as well as offering information on implementing systems.
It consists of three parts: an introduction to knowledge sharing in large organizations; empirical
studies of expertise sharing in different types of settings; and detailed descriptions of computer
systems that can route queries, assemble people and work, and augment naturally occurring social
networks within organizations.

426 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 2, 2002