Support Services: Persuading Employees and Customers to Do what Is in the Community’s Best Interest

Abstract

Getting workers to share knowledge in situations where “knowledge” is the primary asset making them valuable is a pressing problem in many organizations – leading to what we call “the knowledge worker’s prisoner’s dilemma.” Interesting variants of this dilemma arise in the contexts of customer support and server system administration. We begin by describing some of the reasons why the uncooperative resolution of the dilemma is so detrimental from an organizational perspective. We then discuss a successful example of a cooperative resolution to the dilemma – the Open Source initiative. We articulate an ambitious long-term thesis regarding the electronic support ecosystem and then describe a multi-pronged approach for facilitating knowledge capture and sharing in the context of IBM’s service industry, thereby facilitating a “win-win” or collaborative solution to the knowledge worker’s prisoner’s dilemma.