Learning and knowledge sharing in a networking environment

Abstract

This thesis addresses knowledge sharing and learning among mobile knowledge workers. The main focus is to study how mobile knowledge workers use knowledge sharing in their work and how these different knowledge-sharing situations could be supported by IT. This is further underlined by two research questions: How do mobile knowledge workers use knowledge sharing in their daily work? How can knowledge sharing among mobile knowledge workers be supported? The study was conducted at a large R&D company in Sweden, using qualitative, ethnographic observations of five mobile knowledge workers. The findings established that a large part of the workers days are concentrated around knowledge sharing in different situations, where the personal and work-related network is an important part. The extensive communication between people, both face-to-face and through different mediums, make it important to locate people and to know if they are available for communication. The extensive mobility among the people studied makes these issues uncertain, since the mobile knowledge workers constantly move between the home office and other parts in the building, or travel to other locations in the world. The findings are divided into four different situations of knowledge sharing: Knowing your nodes, Knowledge sharing about meetings, Locating for unscheduled meetings and Communication of availability. Design implications concerning these different situations are presented, where indications about how knowledge sharing and learning in these situations could be supported with IT. These implications contain both guidelines and more concrete examples of possible IT support for specific situations.