Knowledge Management and Collaboration

We report on a study of the relationship between collaboration and knowledge management. Successful knowledge management projects encourage and enhance collaboration between employees. The presence of ‘collaborative’ technologies might help that process but does not automatically increase collaboration. Empirical evidence is taken from a broad range of organisations: Anglian Water plc, BG Technology, BP Amoco plc, Ernst and Young and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). Four of these organisations focus their knowledge management policy on the development of their corporate intranet. The empirical evidence shows that knowledge management is a collaborative activity, which depends on the creation of ‘shared context’ between the participants. This is more likely to occur with a combination of face-toface meetings and machine-mediated communications. __________________ The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provide that copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage Proc. of the Third Int. Conf. On Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM2000) Basel, Switzerland , 30 – 31 Oct. 2000, (U Reimer, ed.) http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/SEUR-WS/Vol-34/

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