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Media Public or Private Best for:
Blogs Either Defender of belief
Discussion groups Either Problem solving
(including FAQ)

Wikis Either Either
Surveys Either Problem solving

Rich directories, Private Problem solving
(e.g., Active Directory)
Standard SM (Facebook, Public Defender of belief
Twitter, etc.)
Figure 9-27 YouTube Public Either
Hyper-Social KM Media

Resistance to Knowledge Sharing

Two human factors inhibit knowledge sharing in organizations. The first is that employees can
be reluctant to exhibit their ignorance. Out of fear of appearing incompetent, employees may
not submit entries to blogs or discussion groups. Such reluctance can sometimes be reduced
by the attitude and posture of managers. One strategy for employees in this situation is to
provide private media that can be accessed only by a smaller group of people who have an
interest in a specific problem. Members of that smaller group can then discuss the issue in a
less- inhibiting forum.
The other inhibiting human factor is employee competition. “Look,” says the top salesper-
son. “I earn a substantial bonus from being the top salesperson. Why would I want to share my
sales techniques with others? I’d just be strengthening my competition.” This understandable
perspective may not be changeable. A hyper-social KM application may be ill-suited to a competi-
tive group. Or the company may be able to restructure rewards and incentives to foster sharing of
ideas among employees (e.g., giving a bonus to the group that develops the best idea).
If these two factors are limiting knowledge sharing, strong management endorsement can
be effective, especially if that endorsement is followed by strong positive feedback. As we stated in
Chapter 7, concerning employee resistance, “Nothing wrong with praise or cash . . . especially cash.”

Q9-8 What Are the Alternatives for Publishing BI?

The previous discussions have illustrated the power and utility of reporting, data mining, and
knowledge management BI applications. But, for BI to be actionable, it must be published to the
right user at the right time. In this question, we will discuss the primary publishing alternatives
and the functionality of BI servers, a special type of Web server.

Characteristics of BI Publishing Alternatives

Figure 9-28 lists four server alternatives for BI publishing. Static reports are BI documents that
are fixed at the time of creation and do not change. A printed sales analysis is an example of a
static report. In the BI context, most static reports are published as PDF documents.
Dynamic reports are BI documents that are updated at the time they are requested. A sales
report that is current at the time the user accessed it on a Web server is a dynamic report. In
almost all cases, publishing a dynamic report requires the BI application to access a database or
other data source at the time the report is delivered to the user.