Persuading workers to share knowledge in situations where “knowledge” is the primary asset making them valuable is a pressing problem in many organizations – leading to what we call “the knowledge worker’s prisoner’s dilemma.” An interesting variant of this dilemma arise in the contexts of technical customer support. We present a successful example of a cooperative resolution to the dilemma, the Open Source initiative, and articulate a thesis regarding the electronic support ecosystem. We then describe a multi-pronged approach for facilitating knowledge capture and sharing in the context of a support service industry, facilitating a “win-win” collaborative solution to the knowledge worker’s prisoner’s dilemma.
By: Mark Brodie; Jennifer Lai; Jonathan Lenchner; William Luken; Kavitha Ranganathan; Jung-Mu Tang; Maja Vukovic
Published in: RC24357 in 2007
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