The effectiveness of electronic tools to share knowledge

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of information and communication technologies tools to share tacit knowledge in organisations. Sharing knowledge is about interactions between human actors where raw material is knowledge. What people share are experiences, skills, codified and contextual information. This behavior is critical to the creation and application of organizational knowledge, and the core of a field called knowledge management. A way of defining sharing knowledge is as the process by which employees exchange tacit and explicit knowledge. Tools based on information and communication technologies have been traditionally used to share explicit knowledge, while in the literature there is no clarity about the effectiveness of these tools to share tacit knowledge. There are reports of the ineffectiveness of electronic tools to share tacit knowledge, as well as reports of their effectiveness to share it. The debate about electronic tools as facilitators of tacit knowledge sharing suggests a current gap in the knowledge management literature. The study followed a quantitative approach. Data were collected from 217 knowledge workers in New Zealand and United Kingdom. In the study, we found that those electronic tools that facilitate dialogue, for example, audio conferences and text messages, are effective to share tacit knowledge and that electronic tools that do not facilitate knowledge dialogue, for example internet and emails, are not effective to share tacit knowledge.