Abstract:
Knowledge management (KM) is essential for keeping and developing knowledge as an asset of organizations. Project team is becoming more decentralized, requiring technology to support KM in project management (PM) activities. The premise to the flux of knowledge to happen is to have a ‘ba’ (shared space) and this should be supported by a set of collaborative tools, such as social media (SM). Nevertheless, best practices in PM do not deal with the KM dynamics explicitly which has caused lack of traceability and loss of explicit and tacit knowledge during the project lifecycle. In addition, individuals desire ease of use and accessibility and yet no longer want a tool to manage, suggesting that SM should be integrated. For this purpose, this research analyzed a solution by a technical instrument, under Design Science Research approach, with the intention of answering the research question: How does the integrated use of SM support KM in activities related to PM in a project of a public security organization? The SM4PM (Social Media for Project Management), a prescriptive framework for guiding integrated use of SM in PM, was instantiated to evaluate KM in PM in a project of public security organization. Data collection was done through four techniques: 1) Interviews, 2) Direct observations, 3) Document analysis and 4) Focus group. These data were analyzed in five stages with the support of the MaxQdaPlus qualitative analysis software: 1) Compilation, 2) Decomposition, 3) Recomposition, 4) Interpretation and 5) Conclusion. Results showed that SM support KM in activities related to PM giving strong evidence that SM4PM framework can be generalized to solve a class of problems, such as collecting lessons learned naturally during the project lifecycle, managing the knowledge in PM, understanding relationship among processes and their integration. As a contribution, the study empirically applied ‘theory to practice’ by instantiating a technical instrument based on ‘theory of doing well’ and applied ‘theory from practice’ to refine this technical instrument. The use of SM4PM framework can benefit project managers, team members and project stakeholders.
