Lilia Efimova has some more interesting thinking on how knowledge management works. Mathemagenic: Knowledge flows are powered by questions
One of the goals of knowledge management is to improve knowledge flows and knowledge reuse in an organisation. While there is much discussion on knowledge sharing, motivation and culture, the demand side of knowledge exchanges seems to get too less attention.
Right on! We don't know what we know until we need to know it (to paraphrase Snowden). We need to understand how our people work with knowledge in all its guises and processes. Learning from others and learning by example are some of the more powerful techniques by people learn. We can't expect this to change if we create "knowledge repositories" without building the related structures around people.
I have a client who wants to change the 'asking over the wall' mode (the coffee pot conversations) to an online database. To Lilia's point, it would make more sense to think about how and why these questions come up in the first place. Can we make the questioning easier and more beneficial to the organization as a whole?