Connectivity Rules of the Inter-organizational Knowledge Sharing Platforms in Government

Governments in China have established more and more inter-organizational knowledge sharing platforms recently, with the aim at reducing knowledge fragmentation, promoting social governance and enhancing local competitiveness. Relationship across organizations on the platform is a challenging and urgent task that requires connectivity rules to ensure successful attachment of knowledge. Current studies have mainly focused on intra-organization knowledge sharing rather than inter-organization, and majority of knowledge sharing platforms studies were conducted in enterprise, university and virtual communities. As for the way of connectivity focuses on web technology-oriented. However, few studies have been investigated on inter-organization knowledge sharing in government, especially on the connectivity rules of the knowledge sharing platform. To bridge the gap and meet the needs of practice and research, the study reported in this paper aims at identifying the connectivity rules of the inter-organizational knowledge sharing platform for governments. Three representative platforms from Ningbo City are selected for case studies, in the meanwhile, three top management, three managers together with three technicians are interviewed to collect qualitative data. This paper analyses connectivity rules of the knowledge sharing platforms during the three stages of knowledge input, knowledge processing and knowledge output. Findings from this research reveal that, there are three kinds of connectivity, presented by infrastructure, knowledge and organization, each of which is guaranteed by administrative policy, business rules as well as motivation mechanism respectively. The research contributes to provide implications for promoting connectivity on inter-organization knowledge sharing platform.