Software Developers' Online Chat as an Intra-Firm Mechanism for Sharing Ephemeral Knowledge

Knowledge sharing is crucial for companies in knowledge-intensive domains, but poses challenges for firms operating in a project-based manner. One domain facing this challenge is agile software business, which is based on autonomous teams and where the technological progress poses a constant need to update programmers’ knowledge. One solution to the challenge is to use various social media tools, platforms and electronic tools for knowledge sharing. We present a case study on a 150-person software company where so-called frontend developers have adopted Skype chat as their favored knowledge-sharing medium. Analysis of almost 16 000 chat messages from a 17-month period, with 4 749 messages analyzed on a content level, shows several uses of this simple medium for sharing ephemeral programming-related knowledge that becomes quickly outdated. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of online chat as a knowledge-sharing tool and provide implications for research on knowledge sharing frameworks.