Review by: Schönwald, Ingrid (2004-07-29)

This paper discusses the shared aspects of organisational transformation and e-learning in the context of a networked society and knowledge-based economy. It highlights the role of trust and collaboration as enablers of e-learning as well as of organisational transformation.

The authors begins with explaining that processes involving consensus building, consultation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing all depend on trust for effectiveness. They illustrate this assertion with the case of user acceptance of internet banking: Technologies that people use voluntarily must be trusted technologies – technologies that are validated, properly supported, and conform to established technical standards.

The authors explore how learning and trust-building in informal settings (outside work) relate to what happens within organisations. They introduce and compare the related concepts of networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. As an interesting aspect of networks they contrast the characteristics of social networks and technological networks: While social networks are largely self-organising, technological networks are primarily pre-designed.

The authors describe communities of practice as an organisational form that provides a balancing influence to the traditional hierarchical organisational structure through self-organising knowledge sharing networks. While traditional organisational substructures such as workgroups and teams have assigned tasks and roles, communities of practice are characterised by the sharing of tacit knowledge through informal interactions among members.

The observation that a well designed learning or knowledge management system does not guarantee the use of the system leads to the issue of trust. The relevance of trust from an organisational perspective is described by the high transactional costs within a low-trust environment. In this context the authors criticise the current trend of accountability in organisations which aims at rising the transparency but often leads to deceptions and erosion of public trust. An interesting notion is the technical aspect of trust which is displayed by supporting privacy and security.

The authors illustrate the importance of interoperability as a prerequisite for collaboration and trust. They define different forms of interoperability, such as political, jurisdictional, semantic, cultural and syntactic, technical interoperability to point out the complexity of this aspect.

A simple model that can be used to classify different kinds of knowledge – know-what, know-who, know-how, know-why, know-where, know-when, know-if – is presented. In informal knowledge-exchange settings the know-who and know-how knowledge is critical. The authors quote online peer-to-peer discussion groups, where members have never met face-to-face, and have to develop strategies for ascertaining the trustworthiness of their peers. They suggest that the practices in peer-to-peer communities might provide a viable alternative to traditional learning practices in organisations.

This articles excels in providing interesting thoughts and reflections for practitioners and scholars to rethink well-established concepts of learning and knowledge sharing in organisations. However, the train of thought of the authors is not always easy to follow which makes this paper challenging to read.