I decided to analyze exclusively research articles this week. All three pieces selected (Chua's "A Tale of Two Hurricanes," Ibrahim and Allen's "Information Sharing and Trust During Major Incidents," and Wong and Lu's "Knowledge Transfer in Response to Organizational Crises") deal with information sharing during times of crisis.

What I learned from these articles is that information sharing is incredibly important during crises; what differentiated the responses to hurricanes Katrina and Rita was the proper implementation of knowledge shared early in the preparations for the hurricanes. Wong and Lu took the same lesson to business organizations-- essentially, in order for any community, whether it is a company or an entire state, to survive any crisis, whether one of business or a cataclysmic event, it is necessary for people to transfer critical knowledge to the people who will need it.

Ibrahim and Allen took that concept and then turned on its head the underlying assumption that trust is an important element in the pre-information-sharing relationship. Instead, their research shoes that sharing information helps build trust between unknown entities. Their research focused on a high-stakes fast-paced scenario (offshore oil crises), and found that trust could quickly be repaired or rebuilt by mutual sharing of information. This makes sense to me in many ways-- it's a show of good faith, for one-- and yet also seems radical and interesting.

This prevents situations like my classmate Lisa feeling left out of the conversation. It even has applications via social media technology, which can be used to transfer knowledge quickly and easily in a variety of channels (which I intend to explore more fully in my next post). And, in the case of Hurricane Rita, it prevents massive loss of life and property.

~*~
Readings discussed
Chua, A. Y. K. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528. doi:10.1002/asi.20640

Ibrahim, N. H., & Allen, D. (2012). Information sharing and trust during major incidents: Findings from the oil industry. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 63(10), 1916-1928. doi:10.1002/asi.22676

Wang, W. T., & Lu, Y. C. (2010). Knowledge transfer in response to organizational crises: An exploratory study. Expert Systems with Applications, 37(5), 3934-3942. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.11.023