Use of Wikis in Organizational Knowledge Management

This article presents the mapping of wiki tool functions in the organizational processes of knowledge management. Mapping these functions and their individual weights in the overall process will identify opportunities for decision-making and the optimization of knowledge sharing, a recognized asset in differentiation and organizational competitiveness. This is an exploratorydescriptive case study based on data collected from a questionnaire applied to 80 IT workers employed at a multinational company in Brazil. The use of mixed methods in data analysis was complemented by content analysis of the research corpus created. A theoretical model is graphically developed following Nonaka and Takeuchi’s knowledge spiral model (1997), a conventional model in knowledge management. In addition, an indicator of the individual contribution of each step in the conversion process of tacit into explicit knowledge is introduced. This case study alone does not enable a generalization of the findings. Therefore, a replication of the process and especially multiple testing of the constructed indicator are indispensable to its validation. Validation of the use of the wiki tool functions will allow the future development of measurements that can be directly employed in the organizational decision-making process. Statistically, a theoretical model is qualitatively discussed, which enables the construction of an initial indicator of the weight of individual contribution of steps in the knowledge generation process using the knowledge spiral model.

A Knowledge Tree Model for Managing Organizational Knowledge

According to the relation of organizational knowledge, this paper analyzes the structure of organizational knowledge at first. A concept of knowledge tree is introduced and a process model of knowledge management is described by a knowledge tree. In this paper a definition of value of knowledge is given and the life cycle of a knowledge tree is analyzed. Finally, some principles for knowledge management are presented.

Dynamics of Knowledge in Software Project Development Environments: An Approach Using Affiliation Networks

This work presents an approach to study the diffusion of knowledge in software development project teams based on the formation of complex social network structures in a public organization that offers information and communication technology services. We collected historical data on the allocation and records of hours worked by people in projects to build an affiliation network. We applied the method of reflections to analyze the data obtained. The constructed model enabled the description of the participation of project team members from the perspective of the creation and diffusion of knowledge in affiliation networks that describe the participation of people in projects, mediated by the knowledge and the capabilities developed for the execution of these projects. A contribution of this work is the construction of indicators related to the process of creation and diffusion of knowledge in the context of the execution of software development and maintenance projects, based on the concepts of diversification and ubiquity applied to the process of knowledge diffusion;an additional contribution is the presentation of an application of the method of reflections in an organizational context applied to the creation and diffusion of knowledge. We found that the application of management models associated with the collaborative method applied to the project development process contributed to the joint growth of diversified and more specialized knowledge alongside the knowledge considered more generic and ubiquitous. Our results show that contrary to previous expectations based on assumptions established at the beginning of the study, we concluded that in six of the seven subnetworks obtained in the period between 2007 and 2013, knowledge based on complex and diversified capabilities showed a growth proportional to the growth of knowledge related to the capabilities necessary to more general and ubiquitous activities.