Global social knowledge management – Understanding barriers for global workers utilizing social software

•Explained barriers for social software supported global knowledge management.•Identified 63 cross-disciplinary challenges.•Challenges explained in organizational, social, technical and cultural dimensions.•Identified barriers are highly context dependent.•Argued which barriers are most likely to occur.

Utilizing social software as a part of a global knowledge management strategy has raised increasing interest in enterprises as well as in the educational domain. Rather than being proactive, organizations tend to face barriers related to knowledge management after the problems occur. When dealing with social technologies in a distributed setting, organizations and individuals face a variety of barriers currently unrecognized in knowledge management literature. Within the study, we analyze knowledge management literature extending the body of knowledge with barrier analysis regarding global challenges as well as social software. Our focus is especially on knowledge exchange and globally distributed collaboration activities in organizations. We argue for contextualized understanding of the barriers, recognizing the challenges studied in similar activities. The paper concludes with a synthesis of these interrelated components, proposing a Global Social Knowledge Management-barrier framework that demonstrates the wide spectrum of possible challenges in globally distributed, social software supported knowledge management activities.