The content for this presentation slides were taken from Nancy Dixon's Common Knowledge. This presentation slides were created by students from Essential of Knowledge Management, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS.

1. Jason Lau Kim Wee 13828
Tay Zhi Wei 13922

2. Presentation Outline

 Introduction
 Example From The Book
 Example From Our Team
 Criteria Related
 Design Guidelines

3. Introduction

 Sharing of Explicit Knowledge
 Sharing of very Technical Knowledge
 Definition: A team facing a technical question
beyond the scope of its own knowledge seeks the
expertise of others in the organization
 Ways to obtain answer to a technical question
 Receiving team broadcast question to colleagues
 Use a yellow page function to find specific
individual

4. Example from the Book

Buckman
LabsTechforums

5. How Does It Work?

 Buckman Laboratories is a leading manufacturer of
specialty chemicals for water treatment, pulp & paper, and
leather industries.
 Owns and manages an internal forum that acts as
electronic discussion groups.
 There are 24 sections in the forum and each section is
led by a section leader, professional library staffs
and sysops.

6. - Nearly half of Buckman employees asked questions
before in the forum.

- About 10-20% responded to the questions.
- Others mostly just read and benefit from the forum.
 Library staffs try to answer the questions with library
resources.
 Section leaders make sure questions in the section are
answered by themselves or forwarding to others.
 Then, section leaders will summarize the content while
library staffs archive them to the library.

7. What Came About?

 However, the questions became numerous to be read
and answer for forum users.
 Librarians thus make weekly summary of the exchanges
of each section for briefer alternative views.

8. What’s Next?
for different language groups:
 Three more forums are formed
- Foro Latino
- Euro-forum
- AAA
 But as non-North Americans associates are familiar with the
electronic environment, the forums are merged back into
Techforum.
 A success factor is that the CEO of Buckman, Bob Buckman
actively ask or respond to a question and mention to
employees who are not seen active in Techforum.

9. Example from Our Team
Technician of Siemens in
PETRONAS Refinery,
 Service Engineer of Siemens
in Headquarters Germany
Malaysia
Technician lodge a report to Service engineer team
the headquarters asking receives report from
how to solve the problem of technician and provides the
loud noises produced by the solution of clearing the dust
old-model machineries and apply lubricant on the
machineries (in email)

10. Criteria Related
Criteria

Explanation
Similarity The technicians being placed in Malaysia is responsible to
of task and maintain the machineries being supplied by Siemens while the
context to service engineers in HQ, Germany is responsible to help solve the
those of problems faced by the technical team.
the source The task assigned to both team is different but they both are
team responsible in solving the problem when a machinery has
problem
Receiving Since both the source team and receiving team are from the same
team have organization and the machineries they work on are the same, they
the are able to communicate and the receiving team will be able to
absorptive understand the instructions and solutions to solve the problem
capacity raised.

11. Criteria Related
Criteria

Explanation
Nature of Problems occurring from the machineries are very infrequent
the task but the task is routine as the machine they are servicing is the
same
Type of The receiving team is asking for explicit knowledge from the
knowledge source team.
The source team will reply to the reports lodge immediately
if the know the solution to the problem or they will not reply
if they do not have the solution
Functional Knowledge which is obtained by the receiving team impacts
areas of the only the source team which is the service engineer team and
organizatio no other team or department
n impacted

12. Design Guidelines

 Electronic forums are segmented by topic
- Segmentation helps to bring questions to real
knowers.
- Otherwise, redundant requests or common answers
will occur.

13. Design Guidelines

 Electronic forums are monitored and supported
- An amount of work and time is required to keep
the questions and answers moving.
- Some monitoring forms include:
 Making rules
 Archiving responses
 Appoint moderators

14. Design Guidelines

 Differing levels of participation are encouraged
- It is normal for percentage of requests to be higher
than percentage of answers.
- Most are passive users benefiting from reading.

15. Design Guidelines

 Knowledge is pulled
- The required answer is “pulled back” instead of
having numerous results with only a few being the
answer.