Managing knowledge over social messaging application: The case of an event management project group

Abstract

Recent research looks into how social messaging (SM) is used to manage the knowledge among managers, and how this leads to decision making in management team. Despite the numerous articles found on SM, which mostly referred to instant messaging (IM), only a few covered the usage of SM for managing knowledge at workplace. The current observation on the changing technology usage trend in managing tasks and knowledge has found that SM applications (i.e. over mobile phones) are heavily used to make important decisions on-the-go. This results to the addiction of creating new SM groups every time a new team or special task force is formed, to ensure constant communication among the team members and to solve issues immediately. Since the concept of knowledge management (KM) is deem relevant to the process of making decisions regarding official work, it is believed that there is a need to investigate the communication patterns in the SM group environment and identify the KM patterns that emerge from these. This paper uses the GUSC Model, established under the concept of personal knowledge management (PKM), as a tool to analyse these patterns, focusing on a sample group of a special task force formed for an important event. It further proves the existence of KM patterns among members of a social messaging group.