A Knowledge Sharing Environment for Sport Management
André Boder
1
and Christophe Barthe
2
1
UEFA, 1260, Nyon, Switzerland
2
Metasud, 38246, Meylan, France
Keywords: e-Learning, Best Practices, Communities of Practice, Information Sharing, Learning Organization,
Organizational Learning, KM Strategies and Implementations.
Abstract: The European football governing body (UEFA) has developed a unique environment to share good
practices. It includes blended learning (including face-to-face and on-line interactive courses), knowledge
sharing platforms and 3D virtual stadium to access specific topics in sport event management. The various
functionalities include solutions to typical knowledge management issues, such as contextual versus generic
knowledge or yet strategies to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The environment provides
access to libraries of good practices in the form of learning objects as well as hints to solve critical problems
in each of the domains of sport management. In addition, the environment is built in a modular way
(knowledge elements consist in storytelling and lessons learned in the form of short video items) which
allows for reorganisation of modules in various forms to generate new scenarios for further learning. In
doing so, the environment is a typical implementation of the recursive nature of the knowledge circle
including creation, collection, organisation and reuse.
1 NEEDS AND OBJECTIVES
Over the past few years, the organisation of sport
events and the administration of sport altogether
have evolved tremendously. As a result a lot of good
practices have been created. But lessons learned are
not applied systematically and good practices are
often duplicated leading to a lack of professionalism
and loss of efficiency
The European football governing body (UEFA)
has developed a unique environment to share good
practices. The objective is to collect, organise and
share the good practices across the football family
(confederations, clubs, coaches, referees etc.).
The project’s components include:
1. The identification of existing occurrences as well
as the design of new occurrences where
knowledge practices are captured, shared and
used. It can be either training sessions to prepare
sport events, workshops to teach sport
administrators, or else the events themselves
where good practices may be captured. Topics
include event management, marketing, medical ,
communication, media & communication, safety
& security, legal, governance and more.
2. A series of world wide learning programmes has
been developed in order to integrate academic
and practical knowledge together. This includes
certification programmes, diplomas as well as
masters degree programmes. Besides their
training objectives, these programmes serve as
additional sources where knowledge can be
captured and organized in the knowledge
environment.
3. The knowledge environment itself consists in a
back-office knowledge base of texts and videos
from which various selections are made to build
particular learning or knowledge sharing
programmes.
4. A network of content experts and knowledge
brokers who both validate and organise the know
how captured and set up scenarios for further
knowledge sharing and learning programmes.
2 APPROACH
The approach selected is clearly interactive,
allowing for co-creation of knowledge through
events and learning programmes (Krogh et al.,
2000). Therefore, it emphasizes « shadowing
sessions » whereby professionals follow experts in
103
Boder A. and Barthe C..
A Knowledge Sharing Environment for Sport Management.
DOI: 10.5220/0004673401030106
In Proceedings of the International Congress on Sports Science Research and Technology Support (icSPORTS-2013), pages 103-106
ISBN: 978-989-8565-79-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
particular task during a sport event. Similarly, it
emphasizes blended learning (including face-to-face
and on-line interactive courses). One of the reason
co-creation is a key parameter is because it induces
comparisons between various practices, therefore
generating a space for contextual practices, which
depend on local specificities as well as for generic
practices which cut across the different cultures
(Boder, 2006).
Also, the knowledge sharing environment has
been designed not only for browsing through a
repository of items, but also to respond to the users’
most common and most critical issues. It is problem
solving oriented (Boder and Cavallo, 1990). For
each topic, a set of answers is provided in the form
of « how to », accompanied by a few hints, allowing
to address a task coherently. These “how to” are
updated as time flows by users who provide input to
the knowledge base.
Because of the multipurpose nature of the
environment, the key words in the design process are
modularity and granularity. As mentioned above,
material is selected from a back-office knowledge
repository and reorganized in various ways to set up
either knowledge platforms or else learning
environments. Hence, it is important to collate the
pieces according to their size (modularity) and also
to their nature (the video clips must address issues at
the right level of granularity, meaning neither too
detailed nor too general).
3 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
ISSUES
One key issue in knowledge management is to
access experts’ tacit knowledge and turn it into
explicit knowledge (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977;
Sternberg and Horvath, 1999). For this purpose, the
environment includes a variety of intelligent video
clips, one of which is a story telling device where
lessons learned from the story are made explicit by
the expert in the form of an interview. Another is an
interactive device whereby the expert comments his
activities by making it explicit why he proceeded in
a way rather than another.
Another issue which is common in sport
management is the extent to which a good practice is
transferable across cultures. In other words, is a
good practice carved in a specific context
necessarily bound to become a standard practice ?
This issue can hardly be encapsulated into a ready-
made solution (Sandberg, 1994). At least, it cannot
be implemented in a learning environment in any
way other than clustering practices according to
subset of cultures.
4 TECHNOLOGY
The knowledge platform used is developed on the
Symfony 2 PHP object oriented Framework and is
using HTML 5 / CSS 3 / JavaScript (jQuery)
standards. In addition, it is based on Mysql database
and is using an XML export file to link with the
UEFA administration database. The Physical
production server is PHP 5.3+ and MySQL 5+
compatible, and setup with administrative accounts
for SSH, FTP and MySQL. The Learning objects are
using XML and Flash Technology or HTML5.
5 CHALLENGES
Three types of challenges have been encountered in
the course of the project. Cultural & political
challenges, challenges related to learning &
processes and knowledge management challenges.
Following are a few examples of these.
5.1 Cultural and Political Challenges
In the context of international sport federations, the
classical constraint “knowledge is power” has come
forward through the underlying conflict between top
hierarchy and professional managers. Namely, sport
is predominantly governed through political moves
and the willingness to link political strategies with
the development of good practices at operational
level is not necessarily omnipresent (Davenport and
Prusak, 1998; Sveiby, 1997; Teece, 2000)
Also, sport is governed by results. In this frame
of mind, focusing on processes required to create,
adapt, share and apply new practices calls upon a
change of culture or at least an adaptation of the
roles assigned within the federation. More generally,
the shift from running day-to-day operations to
investing into development is a difficult one to make.
5.2 Challenges Related to Learning
and Processes
When development has been accepted as a critical
strategy, then another step has yet to be overcome.
New methodologies based upon interactivity,
knowledge sharing and with the support of
technology must be understood (Boder and
icSPORTS2013-InternationalCongressonSportsScienceResearchandTechnologySupport
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Gutierez, 1993).
Another common challenge to face is to move
away from the idea that a knowledge environment
should provide ready-made solutions. Grabbing a
few hints from here and there, then to adapt it to
your own context and to carve your own good
practice is also not necessarily obvious for everyone.
5.3 Knowledge Management
Challenges
You never start from scratch. Therefore, linking new
practices to your own way of doing things is a
challenge, not mentioning the technical challenge
you face when you already have databases that need
to become evolving databases if they were not
designed with such a philosophy.
The level of granularity of knowledge mentioned
above is certainly the hardest challenge, since the
utility of good practices strictly depends upon its
applicability to as many situations you face as
possible. If the learning objects are too detailed, they
will not serve much of a purpose. On the contrary, if
they are too general, they will not be seen as
bringing an added value to the situation.
The issue of validation of knowledge is also a
tricky one although in principle the idea behind
knowledge management is not to come up with a
validating process in the same way as you would for
scientific papers for instance. The term good
practice is carved precisely to suggest that,
depending on the context, a practice may be more
adequate than another one. However, some practices
are standard and therefore need to be validated as
“best practices”, while others are not (Argyris and
Schön, 1978).
Finally, the biggest challenge probably stems
from a huge confusion overwhelmingly present
between document management and knowledge
management. The paradigm behind the environment
developed here is the recursive loop between the
capture, organisation and reuse of good practices in
the form of yet new sharing scenarios. The added
value in the knowledge management process does
not stem from just a one time capture of knowledge
and its storing into a database but precisely its
progressive refinement through a recursive process
(Boder, 1992).
6 CONCLUSIONS
The design of such an environment must obviously
be based upon a careful analysis of users’ needs and
requirements. The platform emphasize concrete
hints, allowing for quick and easy solutions for the
user. But at the same time, the idea is to trigger
reflexion and to induce comparisons between the
various practices. Hence, the structure and the
material have been conceived to provide both ready-
made solutions but also to push the user to create his
or her own solution adapted to the specific context.
Clearly, this calls for an environment where you do
not find “the” best practice but instead a variety of
ideas to choose from.
The most critical requirement is clearly the user
friendliness and the relevance and the speed of
results of the search function. Here, the platform’s
efficiency is dependant upon the way the metadata
have been built in. Namely, the material shall not be
tagged too narrowly, again allowing the user to
compare between sometimes even contradictory
possibilities to address a challenge.
Finally, the two major lessons to be learned
when designing such a tool include first and
foremost a philosophy emphasizing blended
learning, anticipating that the platform shall be used
in parallel with face-to-face sessions where
complementary and more in-depth pieces of
knowledge may be shared and created. Secondly,
there is a tendency to believe that each context
should rely upon specific material whereas in fact
more generic knowledge may often be applicable
across domains and across topics.
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