147 Ifkad2011

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The Growth of Interpersonal Knowledge Accelerated

by Web 2.0 Technologies
Zeljko Panian
Department of Informatics
Faculty of Economics, University of Zagreb, Croatia
J.F. Kennedy Sq. 6, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia

Structured Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine a potential contribution of emerging
Web 2.0 technologies to further development of Knowledge Management methodologies,
particularly those addressing interpersonal type of knowledge. As far as we know, there
are rather many studies, books and papers investigating and describing the impact of Web
2.0 technologies on other two types of human knowledge impersonal and personal
knowledge but there are just few dealing with interpersonal knowledge, i.e. knowledge
that is implicit between individuals and embedded in their conversations, connections and
interactions. This is the main reason why we think it is worth examining how Web 2.0
technologies can support the growth of interpersonal knowledge, the value of such
knowledge and its use in businesses and enterprises.

Design/methodology/approach Web 2.0 technologies create brand new challenges
concerning the methodology of Knowledge Management. Their ease-of-use and
pervasiveness strengthens their potential of sharing knowledge within groups and
organizations, as well as intensive collaboration of individuals forming these groups.
Sharing knowledge strongly contributes to creation of new, interpersonal knowledge that
deserves appropriate respect and treatment, and can and even should be stored in
appropriate knowledge bases. In the paper we examine some important features of Web
2.0 technologies relevant from the Knowledge Management point of view. We also
explore their potential of creating interpersonal knowledge, the nature and value of
interpersonal knowledge cumulated in business organizations.

Originality/value This methodology puts in evidence the imperative of at least partially
changing and updating two popular methodologies of Knowledge Management developed
in the first decade of 21
st
century and rather intensively practised in contemporary
business operations and management. We intend to propose some modifications and
additions to those methodologies that could make their application more efficient and
compliant with opportunities offered by Web 2.0 and similar emerging technologies.

Practical implications The outcomes of the application should provide guidelines for
modification of existing Knowledge Management methodologies, accepting the growing
impact of Web 2.0 technologies on contemporary business practices and their popularity
in user communities.

International Forum on Knowledge Asset Dynamics - IFKAD 2011
Tampere, Finland 15-17 June 2011

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Keywords Knowledge management methodology, interpersonal knowledge, Web 2.0
technologies, collaboration

Paper type Academic Research Paper

1 Introduction
Web 2.0 is a hot topic. Articles are written, search engines are sending alerts and
adding new types of information and a new spirit is out in the Internet. People, dealing
with Knowledge Management find the Web 2.0 phenomenon fascinating.
Organisations are becoming increasingly interested in the benefits of applying Web
2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, RSS, content sharing, tagging and social
networking to their working practices. They wish to gain advantage by engaging with a
large community of users providing knowledge that can be leveraged into the
organisations strategies, products, and services (Levy, 2009). However, for many
organisations taking advantage of Web 2.0 communities will necessitate a cultural shift.
Maybe the most exciting benefits of Web 2.0 technologies to Knowledge
Management methodologies are:
They are easy to use and require no special expertise to implement them.
They increase knowledge in chosen field.
They enable building both internal and external knowledge-sharing networks.
They bridge generational barriers and gaps among people.
They improve trust and propagate collaboration within groups of people.
They increase competency for thriving in information abundance.
They maintain long-term employability.

Because all of that, Web 2.0 technologies may be viewed as strong catalysts for
building virtual communities. Web 2.0 communities are informal and ill-defined, and an
individual can have varying roles and degrees of interest in the community, which can
alter over time. There is generally freedom of expression, rules and boundaries emerge
from consensus and are enforced by the community. Therefore organisations adopting
Web 2.0 practices must move away from structured command and control systems
towards collaboration and teamwork and from a process-centric to a people-centric model
(Funk, 2009). To successfully exploit Web 2.0 communities, organisations must
recognise the challenges and avoid the potential hazards. Thus, they must take the

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different characteristics of professional organisations and Web 2.0 communities into
account, particularly when Knowledge Management is in question (Mamgai and Jolly,
2009).
2 Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management
The concept of Web 2.0 is often referred to as an umbrella term, used to explicitly
express the framework of ideas and technology it creates (Shuen, 2008). An essential part
of the Web 2.0 is user contributed content and knowledge creation. The user contributed
content is collaboratively annotated (e.g. by tags), shared in social network platforms and
collaboratively improved (e.g. in wikis) harnessing the collective intelligence of the
individual users and leveraging network effects.
The knowledge managed within Web 2.0 applications lies in content contributed by
the users. This knowledge is published, enriched, shared, communicated and combined.
From a Knowledge Management point of view, the essential aspects of Web 2.0 can be
summarized into six important processes.
Those six processes where derived from an extensive analysis of related work in the
field of Web 2.0 (Schwagereit et al., 2008) that has been conducted earlier. For each
process, representative examples of Web 2.0 applications are provided and its relation to
the processes of traditional Knowledge Management is identified:
Knowledge syndication Users publish their opinions, experience and
knowledge to a broad community of recipients. The recipients can randomly
access the information or subscribe to it. The knowledge producer is typically
known to the recipients. Web 2.0 applications that support knowledge
syndication are blogs, podcasts and news feeds. With respect to the traditional
Knowledge Management processes, knowledge syndication mainly deals with
knowledge transfer, i.e. making pieces of knowledge of a person or organization
explicit and providing it to other persons and organizations.
Collaborative knowledge creation It deals with joined creation of explicit
knowledge resources, e.g. text or hypertext documents. In contrast to the
knowledge syndication, where the authors of the knowledge are known to the
consumers, this is typically not the case in collaborative knowledge creation. The
group of users collaboratively creating the knowledge can be an open community
such as the Internet users or closed such as a specific division of a company. A
Web 2.0 application for collaborative knowledge creation is the use of wikis in

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organizations and its collaborative creation of articles. Collaborative creation of
knowledge mainly deals with the creation of (new) interpersonal knowledge or at
least making implicit knowledge explicit.
Collaborative knowledge exchange The way of solving a problem an
individual has by exploiting the wisdom of others in a group or community. A
description of the problem is made available to an open or closed group of users.
The users can give hints, make suggestions how to solve the problem, give
concrete solution directions and discuss about them. All feedback, hints,
answers, and solutions provided are visible to all users of the community.
Examples of Web 2.0 applications that provide for collaborative knowledge
exchange are discussion forums and question and answering systems. The
collaborative knowledge exchange process focuses on knowledge transfer and
knowledge application. The transfer of knowledge takes place by users providing
their contribution to the problem solving process as a form of interpersonal
knowledge.
Knowledge and meta-knowledge sharing Users share their knowledge with a
group of other users or an organisation. The sharing can be within a closed or
open community. Users possess the knowledge they contribute and sharing
typically comes in combination with creation and sharing of meta-knowledge.
Meta-knowledge are descriptions of the pieces of knowledge, i.e. it is knowledge
about knowledge. Typically tags are used as meta-knowledge. The process
differs from knowledge syndication insofar as it is typically not about a one to
(very) many relationship as with, e.g. mass media. Web 2.0 applications that
allow for knowledge and meta-knowledge sharing are content sharing systems.
Social networking Users typically provide some personal information such as
interests and affiliation(s) and share it with the community. In addition, the users
can explicitly state that there is a connection between themselves and other users
(contacts). Considering social networking with respect to the traditional
processes of Knowledge Management, the main relation can be seen with
knowledge storage and retrieval. It also supports the creation of knowledge (the
social network itself). Another, secondary, purpose of social networking is the
transfer of knowledge.
Knowledge orchestration Process that implements the combination of different
open infrastructures and thus merging different resources of knowledge to create

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a new service and to provide better insights into the knowledge. It can be used
for better exploring knowledge and its combinations; often achieved with maps,
timelines or diagrams. Web 2.0 applications making use of knowledge
orchestration are typically called mashups, providing a (predefined) combination
of different knowledge sources. The process of knowledge orchestration allows
for interpersonal knowledge creation through combination of existing resources.
The goal of this combination is knowledge transfer and knowledge application.
Transfer of knowledge means that by accumulating the knowledge and
presenting it through different visualizations, it can be perceived and acquired.

3 Development of Knowledge Management Tools and Facilitators
Historically, collaborative tools (such as e-mail, structured file sharing, document
management, and calendaring) have done a good job of supporting impersonal and
personal knowledge. However, they have been poor at enabling the kinds of social
artifacts needed to effectively capture and use interpersonal knowledge in a business
environment (Vossen and Hagemann, 2007).
Facilitating real-time communication, coordination, and collaboration among groups
of people was the goal of the next generation of software called groupware (for example,
Lotus Notes). These applications were a major leap forward, for the first time combining
tools such as project management, calendaring, chat, whiteboards, and document
management. But although groupware was effective in introducing task-based tools to
enterprise users, it was limited to new capabilities developed by administrators; end users
were not able to create more customized solutions. Additionally, like most enterprise
software, groupware was not designed to anticipate the rich collaborative, user-centric
possibilities brought on by the Internet.
The new generation of collaborative work may be defined by the shift from
information handling to interaction management, or socialization. Social networks such as
Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn might seem at first to be more about play than about
work but it is precisely such play and the recurring stickiness it engenders that will allow
people to tap into the collective knowledge of their coworkers. Social networking will
succeed where earlier approaches to collaboration, such as traditional Knowledge
Management and groupware tools, have failed (Casarez et al., 2009).

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What can the enterprise learn from social networks? First is the notion that birds of a
feather flock together. Communities of interest will quickly form without the need for
top-down hand-holding. When people build their own groups, the connections are
stronger and the interactions more frequent and long lasting. Second, with better tools, a
faster rate of user adoption is evident. Enterprise users, spoiled by the ease of consumer
software, dont want to perform complex installations, remember arcane passwords, or
learn something new just to be able to share with their coworkers.
But one important question arises: Why hasnt still there been a plethora of enterprise
software offerings for social software? Although Web technologies have advanced to the
point where building applications on top of a networked infrastructure is easier, building
an online social graph that mirrors employees real-world interactions is still very hard.
And what are the benefits of using a social application within the enterprise? Instead of
viewing Facebook as a distraction, the savvy enterprise should learn what makes it so
sticky and how those capabilities could be applied to the enterprise to drive knowledge
worker productivity and accelerate innovation.
Enterprise social applications are obviously going to be the next generation of
collaboration and productivity tools, capturing the interpersonal knowledge of workers
and the implicit connections among people, systems, and data. With them, the invisible
becomes visible and actionable in a way never before possible.
4 Interpersonal Knowledge Management
In recent years, knowledge work has strongly changed. From this point of view,
knowledge can today be divided into three major types (Maier, 2005):
Impersonal knowledge is those ideas and pieces of information made explicit in
documents, files and folders, or on the Web. Impersonal knowledge may be
publicly accessible or accessible to a limited (closed) group of authorized people.
For example, the content published on an enterprise Web page may be used by
anyone who wants it while the enterprise database content may be referenced
only by authorized employees.
Personal knowledge is the private tacit learning locked inside individuals
heads. Private or personal knowledge is knowledge that is idiosyncratic and
specific to individuals (Turban, Aronson, and Liang, 2005). For example, our
dreams and fantasies are not usually accessible to each other. While somebody
can know with certainty that he had a dream about a nice trip to countryside last

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night, there is no way anyone else can verify or falsify this claim. Consequently,
the dream is not considered shared knowledge.
Interpersonal knowledge is implicit between individuals and embedded in
peoples conversations and connections. Knowledge that is interpersonal is
knowledge that is shared, or agreed upon, by a community of individuals. For
example, physicists agree with each other on the charge of the electron and
mathematicians agree with each other that the Pythagorean theorem is true. Thus,
interpersonal knowledge is relative to a specific community of people and is
associated with generally accepted methods and procedures for verifying the
validity of their shared knowledge, thereby distinguishing it from private or
personal knowledge (Segaran, 2007).

Transition from impersonal to interpersonal Knowledge Management means a shift
from managing the capture of explicit knowledge to connecting the right people, to the
right knowledge, at the right time. Web 2.0 technologies and collaborative tools are one
of the strongest enablers of such a change.
This transition is schematically shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 The Knowledge Management Evolution

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At the enterprise level, traditional intranets and groupware platforms fail to serve the
needs of todays dynamic enterprise: they dont foster end-user participation, are
cumbersome to install, and are often difficult to learn. Typically, they are built on
proprietary technologies that severely limit their ability to adapt to new requirements; top-
down, prescriptive approaches limit adoption among those for whom the system was
designed. The ability to apply consumer Web 2.0 trends in business via interpersonal
Knowledge Management represents an opportunity to dramatically improve how
colleagues interact for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and content creation.
When interpersonal knowledge is in the focus of Knowledge Management in the
enterprise, it transforms into one in which communications become conversations. All
employees are on an equal footing when it comes to participation in knowledge creation,
sharing, and consumption. To make this possible, the enterprise requires an open
environment in which people and systems across the business can work together and
leverage each others implicit activities. Pull systems emerge to complement the push
systems over which IT exercises control (Blanger, and Allport, 2007). Employees gain
greater control over the knowledge and information they receive, the devices they use,
and the applications they run, while the enterprise itself becomes more social.
In many organizations, this will be an adjustment, particularly for IT. After putting
social systems in place, IT must be willing to step aside so employees can choose the
feeds, blogs, and wikis that they want to follow, as well as create their own applications in
the form of mashups and social networks. It is already happening in todays enterprises,
and social applications are being implemented at a fast pace.
A model of the enterprise implementing both Knowledge Asset Management and
Interpersonal Knowledge Management may be seen in Figure 2.


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Figure 2 A model of the enterprise Knowledge Asset Management
and Interpersonal Knowledge Management

Web 2.0 technologies have positioned interpersonal knowledge exchange networks as
a key factor in understanding the knowledge creation process. They represent not only the
exchange partners but also the knowledge or resources that may be acquired through the
network. Knowledge creation and interpersonal knowledge exchange networks become
inextricably linked and it is evidenced that a positive relationship exists between the two.
In effect, an interpersonal knowledge exchange network facilitates the knowledge
creation process because it directly affects the conditions of the combine and exchange
process.
Organizations cannot create knowledge without the actions and interactions of
individuals because knowledge is created by and resides within individuals (Nonaka and
Takeuchi, 1995). New knowledge is created when individuals solve problems by
combining and exchanging information and know-how with others (Park et al., 2007).
Individuals must first exchange information and know-how; then, recombine newly
acquired information and know-how with existing information and know-how to create
new knowledge. Who an individual knows, impacts with whom they exchange
information and know-how and their knowledge creating capabilities. Knowledge is thus
created through the dynamic interactions among individuals.

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It is important to note that the knowledge creation process often relies upon
interactions with others outside as well as within the organization. Organizations act as
social communities to provide the setting in which individuals interact to create,
replicate, and transfer knowledge. Within organizations, individuals seek out others with
whom to exchange and combine knowledge in the pursuit of developing new knowledge
(Kitoogo, and Baryamureeba, 2007). One organization, however, rarely holds all the
needed knowledge. Often in their search for unique know-how and information,
individuals who have the freedom to choose with whom to work, will go beyond the
organizations boundaries in search for exchange partners in order to generate new
knowledge for the organization.
5 What to Expect from the Future?
Interpersonal Knowledge Management supported by Web 2.0 technologies is just one
step on the road from chaos to perfect harmony or justice in knowledge-relying
organizations.
As it can be seen in Figure 3, the first step on this road is capturing, organizing,
cleansing, and storing relevant data as a presumption of gaining insight in what has
previously been seen as chaos. Captured, organized, cleansed, and stored data reduce
entropy and transform chaos into a kind of a system. Activities related to data handling
are called Data Processing.
When data are put into appropriate context and relation to persons that may be
interested in what this data actually represent and mean information is derived.
Information quantity derived is in inverse proportion to entropy reduced (Boisot, 1998)
while its quality must be measured using much more complicated methods. Activities on
deriving information from data, as well as of transforming information in different
manner, are called Information Processing.
Combining information with human know-how is the essence of creating knowledge
(Teece, 1998). As explained in previous chapter, there are three types of knowledge:
impersonal, personal, ad interpersonal. All three types of knowledge must be managed to
make them usable for individuals and organizations. Managing impersonal knowledge
and combining it with personal knowledge represents the third step in intellectual assets
management, and it is usually called Knowledge Asset Management.
Knowledge that is created through communication and interaction within a real or a
virtual human community is called interpersonal knowledge. As with impersonal

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knowledge, dealing with interpersonal knowledge (creation, syndication, exchange,
sharing, networking, and orchestration) deserves a full attention, care, and rigor.
Activities of handling interpersonal knowledge are known as Interpersonal Knowledge
Management, and this is the last step of intellectual asset management evolution achieved
until today. The role of Web 2.0 technologies in this evolutionary phase is inevitable.
But that is certainly not the last step in this process; there are at least two more stages
that have to be reached creating wisdom and achieving a kind of harmony and justice in
an organization. Investigating ways and means to realize these steps should be the
primary task for researchers in a field of intellectual assets. They are major milestones for
the future work in this field.
The whole evolutionary path of intellectual assets management from chaos to justice
is shown schematically in Figure 3.

Figure 3 The evolutionary path of intellectual assets management

7 Conclusions
Knowledge Management is a management discipline that continues to evolve in
theory and practice. In simple terms, Knowledge Management is best defined as the body
of understanding and skills that is mentally constructed by people. Knowledge is
increased through interaction with information (typically generated from other people).

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While the term, Knowledge Management is popular, there are many interpretations
and more importantly many misunderstandings of what Knowledge Management
actually means (Calabrese and Orlando, 2006). It is not the mechanical organization of
knowledge; nor is Knowledge Management solely about content. Knowledge
Management is a system and a process, and not just about content. It is also about culture
as culture creates the context for knowledge to effectively be cultivated and to flow
effectively.
The value that Web 2.0 and social mediated technologies provide to Knowledge
Management is that they create an enabling collaborating infrastructure to help people,
communities and social networks to adaptively generate interpersonal knowledge in real
time. Web 2.0 provides for a more open, transparent, and organic form of communication
which accelerates organizations ability to support and further achieve the Knowledge
Management organizational goals.
Interpersonal knowledge is what allows individuals and organizations to innovate and
grow, and without it's capabilities and generative power we would not evolve as a human
species. Web 2.0 and social mediated arrangements are simple toolkits that accelerate our
ability to create, share, organize, and consume interpersonal knowledge as well as build
communities of interest relevant to our goals and needs.

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The Growth of Interpersonal Knowledge Accelerated

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