Role of Web 2.0 in knowledge Management.

Information Technology plays a key role in knowledge management process. It continuously has a notable impact on its progress. Sharing knowledge from dispersed environment can create lot of inconvenience. Further the trust between the online communities can be damaged due to lack of direct interaction among them. This will prevent people from sharing their knowledge. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technology in the field of knowledge management, the problems can be solved substantially (Wan and Zhao, 2007).

What is Web 2.0?

It is considered as the second phase of the web evolution. In O’Reilly’s view he defines the WEB 2.0 as ‘‘the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as plat form, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them’’ (Levy, 2009).

Web 2.0 Technologies

This includes many new technologies, such as (Murugesan, 2007):
Blogs: It is a very strong web based tool that is used to communicate among people through ideas, and comments.

Really Simple syndication (RSS): It is an XML file that are that act as a web feeds that is used to syndicate web contents from web pages.

Wiki: It is a simple and dominant web based system that is used to produce and amend the web contents.

Tags, Folksomony and tag clouds are some of the other technologies.

The following diagram illustrates how these technologies can be integrated in to one Web 2.0 framework (Wan and Zhao, 2007).



Figure 1. The components and ideas of Web 2.0(Wan and Zhao, 2007).

Impact of Web 2.0 in Organization Knowledge Management

The Organizations which have implemented the web 2.0 technologies and tools are referred as enterprise 2.0. Web 2.0 combines technologies, business strategies as well as social trends. Being more dynamic it helps the organization to establish social networks through which the users can share their common interest and helps to gather collective intelligent.
For example the educational institutions like universities uses web 2.0 technologies to share the knowledge among the people who have the common interest. I would like to take one specific technology in Web 2.0 to explain how it can contribute to the Knowledge management process in a given organization.

With the Use of RSS feeds the students can share their subject specific feeds by creating a linking list of all of the subscription lists on a particular topic or a subject area and publish it one central space so all the students who are interested can share and benefit the feeds that others have found.
Other than this a repositories of ‘Learning objects’ can be created to gain reusability is the education. It also helps the educators to share their work and knowledge with others without redoing things that are already available. (D’souza, 2009)
Conclusively, there are many ways the web2.0 helps organizations to share and manage knowledge effectively which can bring endless benefits to the organization.


References:

Murugesan, S., (2007), “Understanding Web 2.0”, IEEE Journal, Vol.9, Issue.4, pp. 34-41.

Wan, L., Zhao C.,(2007), “Construction of a Knowledge Management Framework Based on Web 2.0”, Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing, 2007. WiCom 2007. International Conference on 21-25 Sept. 2007 Page(s):5341 – 5344.

Levy, M., (2009), “WEB 2.0 implications on knowledge management”, Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol.13, Issue.1, pp. 120-134.

D’souza, Q., “RSS Ideas for Educators”, Available Online: http://teachinghacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/RSS%20Ideas%20for%20educators111.pdf. [Accessed 10 March, 2009].