TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEM PROPOSAL TO FOSTER

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING

INTO ORGANIZATIONS

Arturo Mora-Soto, Maria-Isabel Sanchez-Segura, Fuensanta Medina-Dominguez

and Antonio Amescua

Carlos III University of Madrid, Avenida Universidad 30, Leganes (Madrid), Spain

Keywords: Transactive memory systems, Learning organizations, Knowledge management.

Abstract: Knowledge management on learning organizations is a broad area that still needs more research in order to

offer to organizations a set of methodologies, technologies and strategies that allow them to capitalise their

knowledge. This paper proposes as a solution the development of a transactive memory system to allow

organizations and their members to collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge in a smart manner,

where every piece of knowledge could be accessible to all organization members in order to help them to

perform their daily activities, and at the same time to allow organizations to assess the quality of their

knowledge as well as to represent, use and reuse all their know-how towards their organizational and

business goals.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is stated that people is the most important asset

into organizations; every person is important due to

his skills and abilities to perform his daily work,

nevertheless, when a person leaves an organization,

he or she leaves with all his know-how in his brain,

this fact constitutes a big problem for organizations,

the typical productivity cost of an employee leaving

is 85% of their base salary due to the mistakes

committed by his replacement (Yelden & Albers

2004).

The first step for organizations to overcome this

problem is to recognize that organization members

are a great source of knowledge and innovation, the

synergy of all the ideas that come from all the

people across the organizations is fostering the rise

of a new kind of society where knowledge plays an

important role; nevertheless organizations need a

global strategy to improve knowledge management

in order to ensure the accessibility, usability,

learnability and reusability of organizational

knowledge. This global strategy, supported by the

information technologies, must ensure that all the

knowledge generated in organizations could be

accessed, reused and improved in a simple and

usable manner. Moreover, this global strategy must

ensure the maturity of the generated knowledge in

order to foster innovation; also knowledge usage

must be tracked and measured in order to allow

knowledge to become intellectual capital, which is

one of the most valuable assets of organizations

(Paradise 2008), (Strong, Davenport & Prusak

2008), (Argote, McEvily & Reagans 2003), (Ajmal

& Koskinen 2008), (Viedma, 2004).

According to the American association for

Training & Development (Paradise, 2008) the

investment in training and institutional knowledge

management and transference had shown that the

business leaders are aware of the value of

knowledge for their success. In spite of this

recognition, organizations in general, independently

of the sector, are not achieving the desired results

and the advantages expected from the investment in

management and transference of corporative

knowledge (Strong, Davenport & Prusak 2008).

The reasons behind organizations’ problems

managing their learning and knowledge assets are

the following (Jacobson & Prusak 2006), (Cohen

2006), (Paradise 2008), (Strong, Davenport &

Prusak 2008), (Argote, McEvily & Reagans 2003),

(Ajmal & Koskinen 2008), (Fontaine & Lesser

2002): (1) The value of the identification of learning

and knowledge assets to the organization is lower at

the senior and executive levels because people at the

non-executive level spend a lot of time searching

271

Mora-Soto A., Sanchez-Segura M., Medina-Dominguez F. and Amescua A. (2010).

TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEM PROPOSAL TO FOSTER COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING INTO ORGANIZATIONS.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 271-276

DOI: 10.5220/0002858802710276

 SciTePress

their information sources through on-line education

or knowledge portals; sometimes this time effort is

not appreciated by the directive level of

organizations, and for this reason they do not value

the possibility of identify organizational knowledge

and learning units as assets. (2) It does not exist an

institutional culture that promotes the share of

knowledge at an interpersonal, inter-group or inter-

department level into organizations. So it is

necessary the definition of procedures and

mechanisms to promote and to encourage

knowledge sharing across organization. (3) The

return of the investment (ROI) in knowledge

management is something not appreciated by

organizations because the use of organizational

knowledge is hard to measure; also there is no

connection between the knowledge used to produce

a product and the strategic goals of the organization.

(4) The organization splits learning and training

courses from their know-how, when both elements

are the two sides of the same coin. The know-how is

not identified as an organization asset and the

material of training courses for the members of the

institution is disconnected from the organization

know-how.

As can be seen problems described above are

beyond e-learning, since they entail not only

learning issues, but also organizational issues related

with the necessity to create a culture of knowledge

management into organizations in order to allow the

assessment of the impact or benefit that knowledge

management has on organizations that are interested

in constitute their intellectual capital.

In order to solve the mentioned problems, a

combination of information technologies and ideas

from different disciplines is needed; the remainder

of this paper will show some of the current solutions

for these problems, as well as the authors’ proposal

to overcome the same problems in a novel way.

2 CURRENT SOLUTIONS TO

SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONAL

KNOWLEDGE

Nowadays there are several research efforts and

technologies that could be used to support

organizational knowledge, nevertheless this section

emphasises those that are most relevant or

recognised. First an analysis of the existent

technological solutions to satisfy the knowledge

transfer and foster transactive memory systems is

presented, later some scientific solutions related with

knowledge management are analysed.

Currently we are immersed in an information

society where new models and paradigms to manage

knowledge are essential (Fundación Telefónica,

2009). In order to overcome this fact, leader

information technology (IT) companies are working

on the development of a set of software tools and

platforms in order to encode, store, and retrieve

knowledge. Following, some of the most relevant

efforts are briefly described below.

Sun Open Learning Center (Sun Microsystems

2009): It offers training courses regarding the tools,

operative systems and programming languages

developed by Sun Microsystems. The training is

done through videos that combine theory, practice

and tests. An outstanding innovation in this learning

offer is the possibility to share acquired knowledge

among users, and to promote self-learning as well as

collective learning through the user communities

that exist in the platform

Microsoft E-Learning (Microsoft Corporation

2009): It is a self-training environment intended to

acquire knowledge and expertise in Microsoft

products and technologies. It offers a set of training

courses that contain theoretical explications,

narrations, videos, tests and games; all of them

intended to empower an effective self-learning

environment. It lacks from a collaborative interface

to interact with other students or instructors.

Cisco Training & Events (Cisco Systems 2009):

This is one of the best offers in learning and

knowledge transfer; it uses a complete set of tools

that foster collaboration and promotes self-training

as well as group-training by combining multimedia

content, collaborative environments and live events

that are broadcasted on the Web. This learning

framework is open to professionals, practitioners and

students all over the world, and is complemented in

some countries by the Cisco Networking Academy,

a common effort between Universities, Governments

and Cisco Systems to create a global education

program.

Oracle University Live Virtual Class (Oracle

2009): This knowledge management offer consists

on a set of videoconference courses where users can

learn directly from the Oracle’s experts. Courses are

taught using a collaborative tool where users can

chat among them, assess their skills in virtual labs

and share applications to facilitate the

communication and sharing of ideas or questions. As

a complement to these courses, Oracle offers a large

knowledge base where users can access additional

education sources to improve their learning. This

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learning framework could be accessed all over the

world.

Besides the technological solutions for

knowledge management described above, there are

several scientific and research efforts that have been

made in order to help society and its institutions to

deal with information and knowledge management,

following some of the most relevant that have some

connection with authors’ proposal are briefly

described.

elearningeuropa.info (European Commission

2009): It is an initiative of the European

Commission’s Directorate-General for Education

and Culture, aiming to promote the use of IT for

lifelong learning; it is focused to promote the use of

multimedia technologies and Internet at the service

of education and training. It offers an open platform

where its users can obtain information, share

experiences, and discuss ideas.

InCaS - Intellectual Capital Statement for

Europe (InCaS Consortium 2009): It is a

collaborative business project between leading

academic institutes, such as London School of

Economics and Political Science, Fraunhofer

Institute and Polytechnic University of Catalonia

(UPC), and a number of SME associations in five

countries working with SME companies. InCaS aims

to develop a way of being able to understand, value

and represent Intellectual Capital for the benefit of

companies internally but also to outside groups such

as the financial community for further and better

exploitation.

e-Learning Research Group at UCM (E-UCM

2009): This research group is part of the Department

of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence

at the Complutense University of Madrid. Its

research is focused on developing methods,

techniques and tools to simplify the production and

maintenance of standards-compliant educational

applications and e-learning systems. In this line, the

<e-UCM> group is involved in several projects in

the e-learning arena, where the key aspects are web-

based systems applied to education.

As can be seen, most prominent companies in

the IT area have focused their efforts to transfer

knowledge mainly using e-learning solutions, they

are not addressing at all the necessity of manage the

intellectual capital of organization in a very effective

manner and promote the development of transactive

memory systems. From the technological point of

view, despite the evolution of information

technologies, there are some issues that must be

addressed in order to improve the learning

experience, to encourage knowledge sharing and to

foster intellectual capital management towards the

development of transactive memory systems.

Following is a list of some aspects that could be

improved in the existing technological solutions and

that want to be covered by authors’ proposal:

(1) They lack of learning contents based on

standards, like SCORM (Advanced Distributed

Learning 2009), to make easier their incorporation in

existent e-learning and training environments. (2)

Most of the content is incompatible with the

accessibility rules and policies defined by the World

Wide Web Consortium (2009). (3) The knowledge

units or training contents are static, their knowledge

does not evolve as the organisation does, so that,

feedback from knowledge users is not always taken

into account to improve the learning experience. (4)

Multiplatform or multi-device access is not ensured.

(5) Knowledge presented by the existing

technological solutions is not connected with the

strategic objectives and business goals of the

organization, so that it is not possible to measure the

return of investment on training. This fact could

discourage organizations to invest on knowledge

management initiatives. (6) There are no

connections between the knowledge that people

acquire through training courses and the know-how

of the organizations. This leads to squander the skills

and knowledge that are learned in training or

learning courses when they want to be used at work.

From the scientific point of view, some of the

unsolved issues encountered in the existing solutions

are the following: (1) There is a gap between the

training and learning resources that are used to

transfer knowledge and the know-how of

organizations, despite both are an essential part of

the intellectual capital of institutions. (2) Most of the

organizational knowledge remains as tacit

knowledge; this is another gap that must be covered

in order to allow the creation of an effective strategy

to represent organizational knowledge in order to

transform that knowledge into intellectual capital

and to create a transactive memory system. A

mechanism to encapsulate, store, share and find the

explicit and tacit knowledge of institutions in a

formal and structured is needed. (3) Nowadays most

of the know-how of organizations is inaccessible and

unusable, regardless it is represented in some way.

(4) The investment to provide to institutions a new

culture that promotes the identification of learning

and knowledge assets with the appropriate

technological focus on human assets and their social

relationship is a investment which return of

investment is nowadays intangible.

It can be conclude that current technologies are

so powerful, nevertheless they are still unable to

TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEM PROPOSAL TO FOSTER COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND

KNOWLEDGE SHARING INTO ORGANIZATIONS

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assess the value that knowledge has to institutions;

on the other hand, there several laudable scientific

and research efforts that have proposed interested

solutions, but managing the intellectual capital of

organizations in order to create a transactive

memory system is a broad area that still needs more

research in order to offer to organizations a set of

methodologies, technologies and strategies that

allow them to capitalise their knowledge.

3 PROMISE: TRANSACTIVE

MEMORY SYSTEM PROPOSAL

In order to overcome the issues identified in Section

2, authors propose to create a transactive memory

system (TMS) (Wegner 1987) to allow organizations

and their members to collectively encode, store, and

retrieve knowledge in a smart manner, where every

piece of knowledge could be accessible to all

organization members in order to help them to

perform their daily activities, and at the same time to

allow organizations to assess the quality of their

knowledge as well as to represent, use and reuse all

their know-how towards their organizational and

business goals. Authors’ proposal includes a

methodological and a technological framework, for

the management of knowledge and its effective

practice in organizations with the following features:

(1) Accessible so that the knowledge could be

efficiently recovered. (2) Reusable (usable) so that

the knowledge could be used and reused in project’s

management into the organizations. (3) Learnable

(transferable), it is related with the ability to learn,

and it is dependent on the profile that people play

into organizations and their interest in doing

something. Quantifiable (measurable), so that the

project’s activities that were developed using the

business assets could be related to the strategic goals

of the organization and therefore the value of those

activities could be quantified. These four features

have never been taken into account together and

even quantification of knowledge use is a novel and

very promising approach in order to improve

institutions productivity and innovation.

The key components of authors’ proposal, are

related to:

• Information technologies, focusing on: (1)

Software technology to support the

architecture, procedures and methodologies

to be defined along this project. (2)

Software Engineering to define the

processes to be deployed and to elicit tacit

knowledge to be transformed into

knowledge units for the institution.

• Knowledge management and organizational

behaviour, focusing on: (1) Knowledge

representation, to have a common

knowledge depiction. (2) Organizational

learning and behaviour, to identify and to

deal with the barriers that could impede that

the knowledge can flow along the

organization levels. (3) Management of

knowledge to transform it into intellectual

capital. (4) Transactive memory systems

that allow the definition of collective

structures to share knowledge.

Authors propose the definition of an architectural

model for knowledge sharing and collaborative

learning driven by levels and roles to ensure the

learnability of knowledge. This model has four

levels:

• Level 1: Lifelong Learning Level, which

will ease the access to the explicit

organizational knowledge and will provide

a representation mechanism for tacit

knowledge based on Product Patterns

(Amescua et al, 2006).

• Level 2: Operative Level, which will ease

the access to the formative or initial

knowledge as well as the tacit knowledge

of organizations. At this level, knowledge

units will be developed including

experiences and data of real projects.

• Level 3: Social Level, which will define the

necessary protocol to share across the

organization all the knowledge gathered

and generated by members when they solve

a problem together. The knowledge defined

by this protocol will be registered as an

institutional asset.

• Level 4: Proactive Level, which will define

the strategy to make all the existing

knowledge into the collective

organizational repository, accessible to

everyone in an accurate manner according

to the profile and competences of each

member in the organization.

Authors have also defined three novel methods

to improve learning, coaching and knowledge

quality assessment, in order to deploy the four levels

defined in the PROMISE TMS; these methods

constitute one of the most important contributions of

authors’ proposal. Following is a brief description of

these methods that will allow organizations to share

knowledge and to ease collaborative learning.

Live Learning (Mora-Soto et al, 2009) method

(Figure 1), which entails three main phases: Phase 1

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“Knowledge Live Transferring”, in this phase

knowledge is transmitted through a master class that

could be hold in-person or via videoconference. It is

mandatory to include during the master class real-

world examples where the knowledge that is

transferred to people has been applied in real

projects. In order to ensure the accessibility and

usability of the examples presented in the master

class, they are stored in a standardized format in a

knowledge base that could be accessed through any

e-learning or collaborative platform compatible with

SCORM (Advanced Distributed Learning 2009). In

Phase 2, “Knowledge Live Explanation”, the

strength of knowledge transference is validated; this

phase implies figuring out an example, which

authors named “Live Example”, where the key

concepts previously explained in Phase 1 could be

applied. Instructors and students solve the example

in parallel in order to promote a group-learning

environment where, if there is a question from any

student, the instructor or any student could solve it

immediately. The purpose of the live example

resolution is to promote knowledge assimilation; it

also allows students to have a chance to apply the

explained concepts in order to corroborate by

themselves the validity of what they have learned.

Phase 3, “Collaborative Learning Experience”, is the

most collaborative phase of the proposed method; in

this phase people have the opportunity to experiment

a computer supported collaborative work

environment while solving a problem applying the

case study method. Instructors and students use a

social network as collaborative work platform;

everybody is a user in the social network,

nevertheless they play different roles. Instructors

play as coaches or mentors during the case studies

resolution while students are organized into working

groups to solve the case study.

It is important to note that offered learning

courses and content used in the Live Learning

Method will be connected with the know-how of

organizations. Also this method will ease the access

to the learning courses as well as the sharing of

knowledge regarding recommended best practices

when daily work activities are assigned and

developed.

Live Coaching method, which will provide the

mechanisms to ensure that the learned knowledge is

properly used during its deployment in daily tasks

and will also ensure that any organization member

will be assisted in case some new information

regarding their daily activity is needed.

Live Quality Management method, which will

keep track of the activities performance through

relevant quality indicators, aligned with the

Figure 1: Live Learning Method Phase 3.

strategic objectives of the institution. This method

will use Six Sigma techniques and non-intrusive

information gathering mechanisms.

The most remarkable technological

contributions of authors’ proposal are the following:

(1) Collaborative work platform, which could be

used from any operating system or dispositive,

besides the use of the platform by blind or deaf

people. (2) Enterprise social networks incorporation

using Web 2.0 tools. (3) Implementation of the

methods Live Coaching, Live Learning and Live

Quality Management for their validation in real

environments.

4 PROPOSAL VALIDATION

Right now there are some organizations interested in

this research work such as CIMAT (Center for

Research in Mathematics, Mexico) and the SEI

(Software Engineering Institute, USA); also some

enterprises are interested in the results of this

research work, such as: Tinval (Spain) and Syngular

(Mexico). They are interested in: (1) The PROMISE

architectural model by levels to implement in one of

their processes of software projects management. (2)

The PROMISE strategic models of collaborative

work development. (3) The PROMISE technological

platform that will implement all the mentioned

models and strategies.

In the long term, it could be possible to transfer

the results of this project to other institutions

because the models and theories developed are

intended to be independent of organizational models

or industrial sector.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper authors have wanted to highlight the

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275

importance that knowledge has for organizations and

the necessity to create not only knowledge

management tools and frameworks, but also a

transactive memory system that organizations

members could use to collectively encode, store, and

retrieve knowledge to foster collaborative learning.

Authors proposed PROMISE TMS as a transactive

memory system where every piece of knowledge

could be accessible to all organization members in

order to help them to perform their daily activities,

and at the same time to allow organizations to assess

the quality of their knowledge as well as to

represent, use and reuse all their know-how towards

their organizational and business goals. Despite

further work is needed to validate authors’ proposal,

they believe that this multidisciplinary approach

could offer a novel mechanism to help organizations

to constitute their intellectual capital.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was partially funded by the Spanish

Ministry of Industry through project PPT-430000-

2008-54 and the Spanish Ministry of Science and

Technology through the TIN2009-10700 project.

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