Abstract

In the age of virtual organizations, managers and experts cease to be lone custodians of the corporate knowl- edge base. Knowledge must be shared across cultural and time-space boundaries to create strategic frontiers in global and virtual enterprises. However, we believe that organizations have barely scratched the surface of the “knowledge sharing game” played across virtual environments. In technology-based organizations, for example, technical knowledge must be meticulously captured and conveyed in a highly cognitive manner to have substantive benefits in raising the competence and productivity of globally-dispersed workers. In this light, we contend that richer forms of knowledge/media representations, such as virtual reality (VR) and 3D imagery, could be creatively utilized to enable improvements in knowledge management, especially within virtual workspace. We further argue that organizational learning evolves to a higher level only when knowl- edge management is radically improved and effectively exploits “organizational memory” with the aid of IT (Stein and Zwass 1995). This paper explores how a technology-based firm, APV Anhydro, has extracted technical knowledge from its experts and creatively presented such knowledge in rich media representations using VR/3D technologies. This enabled APV to share rich technical knowledge across its global marketing operations, and as a consequence, accelerated its organizational learning process.

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