Managing Organizational Knowledge in the Age of Social Computing

Abstract

Technology, since the days of the Industrial Revolution, has been used by large corporations, such as factories and the railways, to great advantage. Starting around the end of the 19th century, technology began to be used directly by the consumer, but remained essentially a means of satisfying a personal need, such as lighting or listening to music. In the past decade, as technologies such as e-mail, Web, Weblogs (blogs), Wikis, and instant messaging have become pervasive, the way technology is used by individuals has changed—it has increasingly been put to use to meet social needs, such as interaction, sharing, and networking. This new paradigm of technology use, and the technologies that have enabled it, may be termed social computing. By its very nature, social computing facilitates the sharing and leveraging of knowledge residing within a community of people. In this article, we discuss how social computing can act as the primary mechanism that enables the management of knowledge within an organization.