Demystifying Knowledge Socialization and Service Differentiation of Selected Information-Technology Firms in Nigeria

Acquiring knowledge and skills is important facet for growth and development. Organisations have seen the necessity of create emerging ideas through socialization so as to meet up with the standards of the evolving world. The technology industry remains one which has huge potential and has made considerable progress in the last few years. A good number of IT firms are slowly beginning to carve a niche for themselves and deliver impressive products and services. IT firms have become highly competitive and despite their efforts in creating new knowledge, they are still faced with challenges of diverse socialization of ideas, innovative technologies, cultural syndrome and competencies for service differentiation. This array of challenges facing many IT firms in Nigeria forces one to question their levels of innovation. This study was specifically, descriptive and managers of three hierarchical levels (strategic, tactical and operational) in the four selected IT firms were selected as subjects of study. The target population of this study comprised IT firms that were listed on JarusHub Nigeria (2017), Nigerian Yellow Pages (2011) and Nigeria Search Engine (2011) which are the commonly used business directories in Nigeria. The multi stage sampling technique was adopted which comprised purposive, stratified and; convenience (availability) sampling techniques. A structured questionnaire was adopted for the study. A Likert-type scale structured-questionnaire and a variancebased (SMART_PLS) were used for data collection and analysis respectively. The findings show that advances in technology (internet) have helped the IT firms to provide new ways to socialize knowledge and differentiate services from their competitors. It was concluded that knowledge only gets effectively socialized when employees are truly engaged, both with one another and with their goals and ‘when dialog happens, knowledge flows and businesses thrive’. This implies that IT firms gain advantage over competitors by increasing and embedding technology interactions to lean in and build deeper partnerships with various stakeholders. Though, one of the challenges observed in sustaining the knowledge created is inadequate training of the employees. Hence, there might be need to send them out for training so that they would know how to exploit the knowledge they have