Effective collaboration and knowledge sharing in short vs. long term SD projects

Sharing knowledge has become a critical part of inter-enterprise collaboration. Knowledge sharing appears particularly in short-term System Development (SD) projects. Most SD projects entail changes to hardware and software. With the growth in such complex SD projects, and demand for unique technical know-how, there is a greater need to explore the dilemma of effective knowledge sharing among SD project individuals, their technical knowledge, perceptions, and social interaction that shape the outcomes of the projects. Effective collaboration is imperative for business success, however, it remains challenging as ad-hoc teams work across time, geographical, language, and technical boundaries. Often times, one team is dependent upon the work, feedback, or criticism of another team in order to progress in the SD, while lack of trust between and within teams appears to hinder the effectiveness of the collaborations as well as the progress of the SD project. Subsequently only some tacit and explicit knowledge is shared among team members. Our goal is to investigate workers’ familiarity with the organization information privacy policy, and their trust on effective collaboration in short and long term projects. In this work-in-progress, we propose a theoretical model for the impact of trust, tacit and explicit knowledge sharing, and familiarity with information privacy policy on the projects’ effective collaborations. We then pose four hypotheses and a proposed agenda for addressing the hypotheses. Some preliminary data analysis is expected to be included in revisions of this draft. We end with a brief discussion and conclusions section.