Toward a Theory of Knowledge Reuse: Types of Knowledge Reuse Situations and Factors in Reuse Success

This paper represents a step toward a theory of knowledge reusability, with emphasis on knowledge management systems and repositories, often called organizational memory systems. Synthesis of evidence from a wide variety of sources suggests four distinct types of knowledge reuse situations according to the knowledge reuser and the purpose of knowledge reuse. The types involve shared work producers, who produce knowledge they later reuse, shared work practitioners, who reuse each other’s knowledge contributions, expertise-seeking novices, and secondary knowledge miners. Each type of knowledge reuser has different requirements for knowledge repositories. Owing to how repositories are created, reusers’ requirements often remain unmet. Repositories often require considerable rework to be useful for new reusers, but knowledge producers rarely have the resources and incentives to do a good job of repurposing knowledge. Solutions include careful use of incentives and human and technical intermediaries. This is the manuscript version of a paper subsequently published as: Markus, M. Lynne. 2001. Toward a Theory of Knowledge Reuse: Types of Knowledge Reuse Situations and Factors in Reuse Success, Journal of Management Information Systems, 18, 1 (Summer): 57-93. Introduction One of the key themes in knowledge management today is the role of information technology in the transfer of knowledge between those who have it and those who don’t. It is widely acknowledged that knowledge has two dimensions— explicit (knowledge that has at minimum been “captured” and articulated and has ideally been “codified”, that is, documented, structured and disseminated) and tacit (knowledge that resides in people’s heads or “muscle memory” and may be destined to remain there). Only explicit knowledge is the province of information technology, including the communication systems by which people informally share their observations and the more formal repositories in which structured knowledge is stored for later reuse. Some people hold that knowledge repositories play are relatively unimportant role in knowledge reuse, arguing that face-to-face communication and good knowledge sharing processes between the sources and intended recipients of knowledge are the keys to successful knowledge reuse. Others are much more sanguine about the potential for formal repositories. The purpose of this paper is to begin building a theory of knowledge reusability, with particular emphasis on the role of knowledge management systems [5] and knowledge repositories, often called organizational memory systems [1] or organization memory information systems [33]. While much knowledge reuse involves access to experts, not access to codified expertise [13, 51, 52] , it is increasingly the case that the identification and selection of experts is mediated through knowledge management systems [7, 52]. Therefore, both access to experts and access to expertise are included within the scope of this paper. The primary source of material for this nascent theory is published accounts of situations involving the creation and use of written and computer-based records for the purposes of preserving, accessing, and reusing knowledge about what was done, how and why things are or were done, what things mean, and how this knowledge can be applied in other settings. In other words, the focus is not on the creation and use of primarily numerical records of the sort we usually call databases, but on the less structured information that is usually stored as documents. The process of theory development involved categorizing and naming observations and creating linkages among them, developing tentative hypotheses and comparing them against other observations. The ultimate goal of this exercise is to articulate a design theory [70] that specifie s the conditions under which successful knowledge reuse is likely to occur. Much work remains to realize this goal. The major contributions of this paper are, first, to identify four types of knowledge reuse situations involving different knowledge “reusers” (shared work producers, shared work practitioners, expertise-seeking novices, and secondary knowledge miners),