I'm the one with the glasses.

My dissertation, entitled "The Use of Computer Conferencing as an Organizational Knowledge Transfer Tool", was a study of news groups in IBM.

When IBM announced the PC in the early 80's, there was an explosion of new technology, software and applications within the company. At the same time, a newsgroup facility, called Forums, had been implemented on VM systems used throughout the company. I was never happy with the conventional explanation of why this mechanism was so popular. I felt it wasn't just the technology but the innate behavior of people to share knowledge within the company - a practice promoted by IBM management.

My disseration, completed in the late 90's, rigorously analyzed hundreds of thousands of newsgroup entries. I found:

• The newsgroup application was primarily an organizational problem solving tool. (Anyone who has used similar facilities, like Google Groups, is not surprised by this conclusion.)
• That the knowledge provided was primarily from personal experience - that is, it was not documented anywhere, therefore, it could not be 'looked up in the manual.'
• That a very small number of gurus (about 100) answered about half the questions.
• If a problem was not answered in about 8 hours, you'd never get an answer.
• Most of the problems were posted by one time or casual participants who never contributed an answer for anyone else and may never have posted again.
• Most threads in the newsgroup were two entries - a problem statement followed by a solution.

The most revealing finding was that half of the answers (that is half of the knowledge) was posted by what the industry calls 'lurkers.' Lurkers are also called freeriders who just watch but don't participate. From an organizaion point of view, this is ok because they are learning from following the newsgroup and we assume that they will apply what they learn to their job. However, I found that half of the knowledge contributed to the newgroup were from lurkers. Simply put, IBM could have gather the 100 gurus into a helpdesk department -but they would have missed half of the knowledge that was available within the organization. Knowledge that was distributed and diffused throughout the large technical community in IBM.

Here is how I interpret these results. Lurkers are following newsgroups for their own benefit. In the process, they stumble upon a problem that they happen to know the answer. They may have had the same problem the day before. The lurker did not know that his/her new found knowledge was valuable to anyone else - but the newsgroup entry triggered that realization and the knowledge is captured not only for the immediate problem but recorded in the archive of the newsgroup.

I came to the conclusion that the newsgroup mechanism was responsible for allowing the capture of about half of the recorded knowledge in this arena because I can think of no other way for thousands of people to come in contact with each other.

If you would like to discuss this topic more, please feel free to email me at bucky@attglobal.net.