Improving the Quality of Knowledge Assets: Governance Mechanisms and Their Implications

摘要

Knowledge management initiatives are less likely to be successful if knowledge repositories do not provide high-quality knowledge assets. Two mechanisms employed by organizations to ensure knowledge quality are using experts to control or edit users' contributions (such as in a refereed repository), and using a community of users to review, rate, or edit existing contributions (such as in a community-driven wiki). The goal of this paper is to explore these two mechanisms by drawing upon the concept of societal governance from sociology, identify the conditions under which they are preferable, and discuss their impact on how users contribute to and reuse information from knowledge repositories. Propositions are suggested and implications are discussed.