Don’t know if this piece will survive in the paper I write, so post it here. This is pretty much what I think on “why people share knowledge”.
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.
I believe that knowledge flows are powered by questions: in many cases employees do not mind to share their knowledge, but do not do it because nobody asks them or because they are not sure that others need to know. This could be one of the explanations behind the success of on-line communities where knowledge bases fail (e.g. in Shell EP case, see Petersen & Poulfelt, 2002 or ask Andy): many communities work in a problem-solving mode, where knowledge sharing starts with a question or problem. In this case knowledge is shared to help others, and it is rewarding. In contrast, submitting a document (for example, “lessons learnt” from a project) to a knowledge base doesn’t have an immediate question behind it, but more of an expectation of future questions that may never arise, so the motivation to share is much lower.
And, as I wrote before, asking is more difficult then answering and reinventing is more fun then reusing.
Guess what my conclusion is? KM is about motivation to learn :)
Tags: asking questions, knowledge sharingArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/23.html#a1181; comments are here.
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