Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 124 – Hazel Hall

Hazel Hall is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Computing, Engineering, and the Built Environment (SCEBE) at Edinburgh Napier University UK, and Docent of Information Studies in the School of Business and Economics at Åbo Akademi, Finland. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

Her main research expertise and teaching interests are information sharing in online environments, within the context of knowledge management. Other interests include information behavior and use, online communities and collaboration, library and information science research, and research impact. Hazel’s doctoral thesis considered the role of intranets in knowledge sharing. 

Here are definitions for five of Hazel’s specialties: 

• Communities: Groups of people who share an interest, a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic. Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another. 
• Intranets: Private computer networks that use Internet protocols, network connectivity, and the public telecommunication system to securely share part of an organization’s information or operations with its employees. 
• Motivation: The process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors.  Why a person does something, involving the biological, emotional, social, and cognitive forces that activate behavior. 
• Research: Creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of information to increase understanding of a topic or issue. 
• Tacit knowledge: The implicit, unwritten, and often hard-to-articulate knowledge that an individual gains through experience. It is the “know-how” that is difficult to explain or codify, often involving intuition, skills, and contextual understanding. Unlike explicit knowledge, which can be readily written down or communicated through formal means, tacit knowledge is deeply personal and rooted in practice. 

Hazel created the following content. I have curated it to represent her contributions to the field. 

Books by Hazel Hall 

Social Exchange for Knowledge Exchange

Tacit Knowledge Sharing in Online Environments 

Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing