Mathemagenic

Note: this is a bit of background thinking for my earlier post on personal ways of doing things in public.

We did several studies looking on how people are finding in-house knowledge in their company (e.g. who knows/what was done on a specific topic). Our main finding* is that in most of cases people search personal spaces (own paper/digital archives, mailboxes) for clues or ask people in their personal network.

I guess this "searching behaviour" would be correlated with "sharing behaviour", especially in case of documents: preferring use of personal spaces (because it's easier) and forgetting about public spaces (because it's extra work). Some examples I have in mind:

• forgetting to add documents to central document management system while maintaining personal archives
• forgetting to update personal expertise profile in a corporate "yellow pages" directory
• resistance in documenting best practices
• communicating via e-mail and not in on-line community

So far these guesses are based on my intuition and knowledge about difficulties of implementing KM, but I don't have any hard data. I would appreciate if you can point to any documented examples or research illustrating/confirming (or contradicting) my assumptions.

* We are working on a paper with more details.