Iris Buunk

The sixth of the seven articles that I recently co-authored for the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JoLIS) has now been published as an OnlineFirst paper. This is ‘Tacit knowledge sharing in online environments: locating ‘Ba’ within a platform for public sector professionals‘ by Iris Buunk, Colin F. Smith, and Hazel Hall. It reports findings from Iris‘ doctoral study, which I supervise with Colin.

With reference to the concept of Ba (Nonaka and Konno, 1998), and based on empirical research conducted in the UK public sector, we draw two main conclusions in our article. First, online social platforms play a strong role in the facilitation of tacit knowledge sharing, and this leads to outcomes of learning, expertise sharing, problem solving, and innovating. Second, such platforms are important to the initiation of discussions among experts, the fostering of collective intelligence, and making tacit and personal knowledge visible and accessible quickly, with minimal effort.

Iris first presented this work as a conference paper at Information: interactions and impact (i3) 2017 in June last year (slides available on SlideShare). The full manuscript of the article is also available to download from the Edinburgh Napier repository.

For further information about Iris’ research please see her blog at http://the knowledgeexplorer.org and her profile on the Edinburgh Napier web site.