Knowledge use and Sharing into a Medical Community of Practice; the Role of Virtual Agents...

Page 11

Virginia Maracine et al

C D

B

A

Figure 4: The “general advice” network for Clinic no 3 Actors

# Inbound links

Actor A

16

Actor D

16

Actor C

10

Actor B

9

4.2 Knowledge sources and use Because the SNA does not tell much about the ways participants use that knowledge, the motivations behind knowledge exchange, and the non–human knowledge sources used by subjects to perform their work, additional analyses have been carried out on the network humans/knowledge tools and resources, the organizational roles that are more involved in knowledge sharing, and the knowledge tasks that are more or less routinely performed by workers. Specifically we tried to answer to the following questions: 

Do the team members use the same knowledge tools to perform their work?

Do they use the same information or knowledge resources to perform their work?

Which knowledge tasks they use their knowledge for?

Which organizational roles are more involved in knowledge exchanges?

Concerning the second question, for example, we have found that knowledge resources include a variety of sources: medical journals, books, internet, videos, etc. The difference with knowledge tools is that resources are just passive repository of potentially useful data but they are not used to perform work tasks, if not indirectly.

www.ejkm.com

74

ISSN 1479-4411


Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.