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166 Chapter 5

Table 5.3
APQC (1999) study on how knowledge is transferred within a company

Verbally at team meetings 23%
Departmental meeting 21%
Written instructions 17%
Ad hoc verbally 16%
Intranet 9%
Video 5%

into the organizational memory or knowledge repository. The knowledge-sharing
processes involved include searching, evaluating, validating, implementing (transfer-
ring and enabling), reviewing, and routinizing ( Jarrar and Zairi 2000 ).
Table 5.3 shows the results of an APQC study that looked at how best practice
knowledge was shared and transferred within organizations ( APQC 1999 ). Their fi nd-
ings show that 51 percent of knowledge sharing occurred as part of a formal process
within the organization, 39 percent was ad hoc, more tacit, likely within a CoP and,
perhaps most striking, 10 percent of the best practices were never shared. This type
of obstacle in knowledge sharing or knowledge fl ow is very diffi cult to overcome.
Social network analysis (SNA) is one technique that can help to identify such knowl-
edge hoarding or knowledge “ black holes ” where content is received but nothing is
ever sent out.
Virtual CoPs must rely on technology-mediated knowledge-sharing channels to a
great extent. Two major characteristics are often used to characterize the channels
used for knowledge sharing: social presence and media richness. Thurlow, Engel, and
Tomic (2004 ) defi ne social presence as the degree to which the knowledge sharer feels
like he or she is talking with another person. The highest degree of social presence
will of course exist in a face-to-face exchange where knowledge sharers can easily hear
the tone of voice, see the facial expressions, and therefore easily infer nontextual cues.
A teleconference will provide the audio cues and a videoconference will provide both
visual and audio contexts. An e-mail or discussion forum, however, must rely upon
text, which has a lower social presence. One of the ways in which we try to overcome
this limitation is through the use of “ emoticons ” (e.g., a smiley face to indicate a joke),
uppercase letters to simulate shouting, shortcut expressions, and so forth.
The second attribute of technological knowledge-sharing channels is media rich-
ness, which is defi ned by Chua (2001) as the capacity for immediate feedback, ability
to support natural language, and social presence. Once again, synchronous commu-