Encouraging knowledge sharing in a web- based platform : A study concerning how to encourage engineers to share knowledge in a web-based platform for knowledge sharing and to use the platform as a tool for measuring the performance of work procedures

Sammanfattning: A design department in the company Sandvik AB in Kista, Stockholm, has built a web-based platform for knowledge sharing that allows the employees to share knowledge, regardless of their role and position in the hierarchical structure of the organization. The web-based platform gathers disseminated information and provides a way of finding needed information in an easy way and thus enables increasing productivity and efficiency of the employees. The purpose of the research was to find out what the potential users find encouraging and motivating in order to use a web-based platform for knowledge sharing and a functionality for performance measurement. Compared to what technically is possible today, there is lack of transparency in the company. The knowledge that exists within the company is dispersed and difficult to access for the employees in the organization. By gathering the knowledge and information and enabling the employees to share knowledge, they could potentially increase their performance of work assignments. The problem that this report addresses is that currently there are not good enough ways of measuring and keeping track of the performance of work assignments or routines in some departments in the company. The qualitative method of semi-structured interviews has been used for gathering data in this research. The data have been analyzed with the method of content analysis. The result of the research is that there are several aspects that need to be considered when encouraging and motivating users to share knowledge in a web-based platform for knowledge sharing and to use it as a tool for performance measurement. The main aspects identified in this research are corporate culture, choice of performance measures, managers’ responsibility, visibility and usage of the performance data and availability of the web-based platform. These aspects concern the attitude of the company and how to encourage and motivate the users to want to use the web-based platform.