A friend in Europe contacted me because their company did a survey recently which revealed that there is a "lack of knowledge sharing" within the organization. And did I have any pointers for her. One of my first questions is what they mean by knowledge sharing. Are people having a difficult time doing their work because of knowledge hoarding? Is there a big wave of retirement, and they need knowledge transfer? Is there a general sense that they don't know what they know?
Here's what I sent her direction:
Here are some articles I have found helpful in the past:
- David Skyrme on "The 3 C's of Knowledge Sharing: Culture, Co-opetition and Commitment," http://www.skyrme.com/updates/u64_f1.htm (2002)
- James Robertson on "Intranets and Knowledge Sharing," http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_intranetsknowledge/ (2004)
- David Gurteen, "Creating a Knowledge Sharing Culture," http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/0/FD35AF9606901C42802567C70068CBF5/ (1999)
- Additional knowledge sharing links from Denham Grey, http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?KnowledgeSharing
There are many potential technologies that could help (assuming the cultural issues can be managed), but a new topic in this arena is the idea of collaboration / collaborative spaces, as mentioned in the Robertson article. Weblogs and wikis are popular on the web, but within corporations there are tools like SharePoint, eRooms, Lotus and other that are more complex (and difficult to use correctly).