An Investigation into the Impact of Information Technology Bank Examiners' Community Knowledge Sharing Sessions on their Individual Performance

• Main Author: Smith, Terence Ivor
• Format: Others
• Published: NSUWorks 2008
• Subjects: Communities of practice; Knowledge management; Knowledge sharing; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/gscis_etd/308; http://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1307&context=gscis_etd

Information Technology (IT) bank examiners have difficulty in making practical use of explicit IT knowledge documents stored in the IT examiners' document repository. This repository contains insufficient context to make it immediately and totally relevant to examiners, especially new IT examiners. At times, the document repository is not available for examiners' use due to limited remote access while examiners are in the field or during systems upgrades. In addition, there are no formal mechanisms for validating and updating the content. The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether the IT examiners information technology knowledge sharing sessions/community of practice (CoP) provide a mechanism for reusing tangible knowledge assets, transferring knowledge, improving job performance, and providing the kinds of support that benefit IT bank examiners. The participants in this study, eight IT bank examiners, work in the bank information technology regulatory environment. Their skills are in their IT domain areas such as information security, business continuity planning, and systems disaster recovery testing, IT project management, and audit rather than computer programming. Using case study methodologies, the data collected was based on questionnaires, interviews, participant observations - meeting and field notes, and storytelling notes. The field data was analyzed using selected principles from Grounded Theory - constant comparative analysis, narrative pattern analysis, and the ATLAS.ti quantitative analysis software. The study found that the examiners reported, perceived, and believed that IT knowledge sharing sessions facilitated the capturing, validating, and transferring of knowledge among IT bank examiners while improving their individual job performance. Specifically, emerging from the research were eight knowledge transfer themes that supported five benefits/critical functions of the IT knowledge sharing sessions - examiner development, knowledge transfer, social interaction, problem solving, and learning opportunities. However, a community facilitator, mutual trust, and respect among examiners and active participation in the knowledge sharing sessions are essential to the process to enable improved examiner performance and, by extension, organizational performance.