Perpustakaan Digital ITB

Blog emerges since 1990s and proliferates in many forms and in higher rate gradually. Among the emerging blogs, there are internal corporate blogs which mostly used to address the internal needs among corporate entities. It facilitates knowledge workers to absorb, maintain, and retrieve any files from other knowledge workers within the company. All knowledge works are handled automatically in internal corporate blog and thus helps knowledge workers to manage their personal knowledge. Unfortunately there are only few companies in Indonesia notice the importance of internal corporate blog. They even do not know much what the best part of this technology can offer to them. It was not easy to collect studies of internal corporate blog in personal level rather than organizational. This research has a challenge to form a representative framework of personal knowledge management (PKM) which captures the dynamic of blogging activity in PT CSI. This company had been chosen as one of big players in IT and network business. As the branch office from the CS, Inc. in United States of America, PT CSI acquires 16 active corporate blogs. They started blogging internally with certain rules according to the Internet Postings Company Policies. Various endeavors have been undergone to encourage more knowledge workers to contribute in their internal corporate blog. In the beginning, top management stressed their workers to write entries minimally once in two weeks. In order to emerge workers' habituation in internal blogging, the rules then changed to be twice in a week for inserting any entries. However the amount of participants from this company is still under the standard line compared with other bloggers from other CS, Inc. branches. The company starts to give more attentions on personal knowledge works through internal blogging since they assumed that it will increase the company productivity. This qualitative empirical study instigated to address the main question i.e. "How do knowledge workers employ internal corporate blog as PKM tool in PT CSI?" It directed the study to clarify the role of internal corporate blog for PKM, to capture various ways of knowledge worker to manage their personal knowledge, and to produce some strategies for companies to occupy the internal corporate blog as a feasible PKM tool for more knowledge workers. It involved four key informants who are the experts and practitioners in (corporate) blogging and 12 ordinary informants who are actively blogging in PT CSI. The focus group, in-depth interviews, observations, and diverse literature reviews were performed from December 2007 to February 2009 for chasing the research objectives. In addition, this study occupied grounded research as the study approach and case study as the research strategy. Content analysis was chosen to study the latent and manifest responses from the informants. Overall this study summarized several significant findings related to the research questions. First, Many individual workers in PT CSI have overlooked internal corporate blog as one of technology options to maintain the internal sharing knowledge, communication, collaboration, and mainly to accomplish several projects with online peers. Second findings highlighted the most-frequent PKM activities which commonly conducted by knowledge workers in PT CSI consist of inventing, documenting, convincing self and others, evaluating the information, organizing, transferring and sharing knowledge, discussion and coordinating, analyzing, improvising the ideas, presenting (new) information, focusing matters, valuing, and securing the knowledge. These results showed that at least company requires four pivotal capitals to hold PKM activities with internal blogging i.e. matters, individual, peers, and technology. It affected this study to produce new contextual framework of PKM describing the way of individual workers share, collaborate, and value the knowledge through blogging in company. Moreover, third, this study produced the list of strategies for building internal corporate blogs as feasible PKM tools for more knowledge workers. This part confirmed the substance of corporate culture and worker's behavior during blogging activities. Furthermore, this current study also proposed the logical thoughts of the importance of doing periodical measurements of those strategies and the considerations towards the knowledge lost which may be happened. There are two groups of recommendations offered for further researches and for PT CSI as the research object. This study has limitations in methodology and some results that might be very contextual and could not be fit with other situations in other companies. Therefore it requires more researches to revisiting the results in other companies with more informants. It also constructed numbers of research ideas to understand PKM, Internal Corporate Blog, and Knowledge Workers e.g. how the Indonesian company copes the barriers in facing the internal corporate blog, how the effectiveness of internal corporate blog can be measured; how relationship among corporate culture, worker's behavior during blogging, and knowledge works; how the individual worker's information can be transmitted to be knowledge for increasing the productivity, and how this personal learning can be expanded into the organizational learning process in order to gain the whole productivity for both the workers and the company. It proved how the area of this research is open for many refinements and construct developments.