Online Knowledge Communities: Breaking or Sustaining Knowledge Silos?

Abstract

Effective operations require the coordination of distributed knowledge. Division and distance across teams and specialties form barriers to communication, creating insulated pockets of knowledge along geographic and specialty borders. Such fragmentation can hamper a company's ability to fully utilize existing knowledge, potentially hurting its productivity in the long run. As such, many companies have created internal online knowledge communities, in which employees can exchange solutions in various knowledge domains anywhere in the world. Although online knowledge communities offer an exciting potential to mobilize knowledge across locations and specialties virtually, little is known about whether such mobilization of knowledge happens in reality. The objective of this study is to advance our understanding of the effectiveness of an online knowledge community in promoting distance‐ and specialty‐crossing knowledge sharing. To this end, we analyze knowledge sharing patterns in an online knowledge community of a global Fortune 500 consulting company that provides knowledge‐intensive services. We find that, despite the global connectivity enabled by the Internet, knowledge is still circulated mostly within a smaller group of employees who are nearby or who have the same specialties in the online knowledge community. This finding indicates that existing knowledge is not efficiently utilized across locations and specialties; thus, companies are missing learning opportunities.