Knowledge Sharing Cultures in Finance and Insurance Companies – Needs for Improving Informal Collaborative e-Learning

Abstract

Working life requires employees to continuously update their competences, making lifelong learning an important but challenging part of professional development. This study aims to look for solutions to uncover the tacit and implicit knowledge within the enterprise by the means of social media. Our interest is specially focused on challenges on informal learning and refining and sharing of the tacit knowledge among these expert companies. We have so far collected data from two enterprises about their current knowledge sharing habits and procedures and found out the pitfalls they have experienced in their working culture concerning finding and sharing knowledge. The main challenges (apart from lack of time, which is quite obvious result today) are defects in storing information in a way that enables its easy rediscovery and the huge amount of information from which to filter the relevant pieces of knowledge. Particularly the centralized experts in an insurance company find the lack of regular vertical interaction between the decentralized claim handlers a drawback. There exists a lot of overlapping effort as they need to tell the same issues many times to various claim handlers. Taking these challenges into account new working models will be put into practice utilizing collaborative tools, like wikis and chat forums.