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discuss the importance of knowledge sharing in the functioning of…

- - - - One major component of knowledge management is knowledge sharing. The knowledge held by organisations, whether in explicit or tacit form, is only useful if it can be applied.
        
        To make this possible, the knowledge must be discovered or created, and then shared or transferred to the people who need it.
      - Today, there is a broad range of processes and technologies that can be used for knowledge transfer. Most recently, social media tools offer strong knowledge-sharing capabilities.
      - Explicit knowledge can be readily transmitted or shared in a tangible, recorded form. However, tacit knowledge cannot be shared so effectively this way, and depends more on personal interaction for effective sharing.
        
        While tacit knowledge is more difficult to share, the effective sharing of tacit knowledge is becoming more critical,
- - - - western cultures such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia)
      - • Individualist cultures see people as independent and unique.
        
        They deal well with explicit knowledge and tend to prefer theoretical analysis and an academic approach to knowledge rather than more practical approaches.
        
        Organisations in this culture have tended to support the hoarding of knowledge by individuals, who have been encouraged to compete with others and maintain their positions of power by keeping their knowledge to themselves.
    - - (mostly Eastern cultures, such as China, Korea and Japan, and most African and Latin American cultures).
      - • Collectivist cultures see people as parts of the whole, where individualism is sacrificed for the benefit of the group.
        -Conforming to expectations and customs is seen as very important, as is family.
        
        Knowledge sharing is more natural to collectivist organisations and they more naturally share tacit knowledge.
        These cultures historically share knowledge by storytelling, which can be an effective way to share tacit knowledge.
- - - - As knowledge work has expanded, more people within organisations need access to knowledge for tactical and operational decision-making.
- - - - The benefits of sharing explicit knowledge can be measured quantitatively, from number of visits and enquiries.
    - - The benefits of sharing tacit knowledge can only be a qualitative assessment, by looking at employee engagement and job satisfaction, team relationships and output from teams, and a more informed work force
    - - some knowledge-sharing systems can require significant investment, whereas conversational knowledge-sharing processes only require an investment of people’s time. Cloud-based systems may also incur lower costs than purchasing and operating an internal infrastructure.
  - - - table 6.4
        
        some of these tools support sharing of either explicit or tacit knowledge, or a mixture of both.
    - - there will be many cases where people need knowledge that may not be readily available in explicit form, and will need to locate a person with specialist knowledge.
        
        One way to address this need is to use an enhanced organisational directory that includes a detailed profile of each person in the organisation, including a list of their skills or areas of expertise. This can also be done with online community platforms.
        
        Communities of practice (CoPs) can be used to address this dilemma, where questions and problems can be posed to the community members for a response. Many organisations have found strong benefits from this approach.
        
        ikonnect
        
        In this approach, a small team of brokers was set up and questions from people seeking expertise (‘seekers’) were posed to this team of ‘knowledge facilitators’. The team would then use some simple searching and repository management tools and their personal networks
        of people in the organisation to locate people with the skills and experience to answer the questions (‘sharers’). Once the correct match was found, the sharer would then be connected to the seeker to respond to the question. As stated by Taylor, then BLL’s Asia/Pacific CEO: ‘ikonnect changes the emphasis. Instead of starting with a system or IT solution, it focuses on behaviours’ (in Knowledge Street 2005, p. 6).
    - - Communities of practice (CoPs) are ‘groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’
      - CoPs have three aspects: PEC
        
        the domain or area of expertise;
        
        the community of people; and
        
        the practice of their field of expertise.
      - For CoPs to function correctly, they must generate a strong community bond between the participants. For this to happen, community members must feel that they share a common identity (e.g. they share a similar set of expertise) and can trust one another. For a CoP to be sustainable, involvement should become an integral part of each member’s practice. Taking part in CoP activities must directly support the members in their day-to-day work role.
      - Generally, CoPs provide an alternative path for sharing knowledge outside the organisational hierarchy; for this reason a CoP is distinct from a functional group or team reporting into a single point in the organisation.
        
        They achieve their greatest value when otherwise-unconnected groups can pool a broader field of knowledge than would be found within a single work team.
      - The organisation can tap into this potential knowledge by nurturing and developing CoPs through formally establishing practices and processes that capture, share and apply the knowledge across the organisation. To be effective, the communication channels thus established should instigate feelings of trust and mutual obligation.
      - A range of technologies can be used to support the operation of a CoP.
        
        A wiki is often an important tool for this, but other communication tools, bulletin boards or forums may also be used. Microblogging can also be an important tool in this context. Where possible, face to face meetings of the community are also important to help establish and maintain rapport between members.
    - - Collaboration
        
        The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas
        
        Examples of collaborative work environments include project management, annual report production, tender submission and product development.
        
        The use of supporting tools is particularly critical where the members of collaborative teams are dispersed and unable to work together in a single geographic location.
        
        audio and videoconferencing. Social media tools including microblogging and video sharing can be important. Tools for collaborative document authoring are also useful, such as wikis, Google Drive, Adobe’s Acrobat.com or Microsoft’s OfficeLive (Manyika & Sprague et al. 2009). Some platforms provide multiple features and services for collaboration, such as Microsoft SharePoint.
        
        Where collaboration only engages people inside an organisation, internal systems can be used. However, cloud-based systems can also be used in this case. Cloud-based collaborative systems can also create new opportunities for improved collaboration between people within an organisation and those outside it—its partners, customers and industry peers.
        
        It is important to match the technology to the nature of the collaborative work being done. The number of people involved in the collaboration, the nature of their interaction and the type of work being done will all influence the choice. It is important to understand the nature of relationships in a collaborative team, locate the key sources of information within the team and ensure that they are engaged in the process.
      - conversation
        
        Recent research has shown that conversation also has the ability to produce outcomes beyond the ability of any individual involved in the conversation. Woolley & Christopher et al. (2010) found that groups of people can exhibit a ‘collective intelligence’ that is independent of the individual intelligence of group members
        
        Further, they found that this collective intelligence was correlated with ‘the average social sensitivity of group members [and], the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking’ (Woolley & Christopher et al. 2010, p. 686). This requires each group member to be aware of the needs of the others and to take care not to dominate the conversation.
        
        knowledge cafe
        
        Some knowledge-sharing tools rely on conversation. The ‘Knowledge Café’ approach used by Gurteen (2011) brings people together ‘to have an open, creative conversation … to surface their collective knowledge, to share ideas and insights and to gain a deeper understanding’ of a given subject. This is done using a process where a group of people sit at tables of three or four and discuss a particular topic or issue at each table. The discussion lasts for 10 to 20 minutes, at which point people will swap to different tables and continue the conversation. This continues for three rounds, with a brief summary conversation at the end.
        Even though a Knowledge Café is not used to explicitly collect action plans or other deliverables, this technique has been found to lead to improved innovation and decision-making in organisations.
        
        Conversation is important to innovation
        
        Bringing together people with different knowledge and experiences in conversation makes it possible to develop new ideas—to ‘expand the range of your possible next moves’ (Johnson, cited in Burkeman 2010). This involves sharing, exploring and recombining as many seemingly unrelated ideas as possible, which can be best done through conversations by groups of people. This swapping of ideas drove the historical engines of creativity in the Enlightenment coffee houses and Parisian salons mentioned in Module 5; ‘Good ideas happen in networks … connectedness makes us more creative’ (Johnson, cited in Burkeman 2010).
    - - ‘Intranet’ is the term for an internal network in an organisation that uses internet technologies to deliver services to staff.
      - Resources offered by intranets can include any of the type of resources provided on the public internet, such as information websites, blogs, search engines, directory services and reference sources.
      - Corporate systems are becoming more integrated into the intranet, making it a ‘place for doing things’ rather than just a ‘place for reading things’
      - An intranet can provide the infrastructure for knowledge sharing and collaborative tools. Many of the tools and techniques used for sharing and collaboration on the public internet, such as wikis, microblogging and other social media, can also be provided within an intranet. Intranet portals can be used as a way of providing menu-like access to relevant network resources for knowledge sharing and collaboration.
- - - - Some processes and practices that can be put in place to construct a coherent knowledge-transfer toolkit are described in Table 6.5.
        
        Table 6.5: Knowledge sharing—key questions and related processes and practices!!!!
        
        figure 6.5!!!
        
        knowledge toolkit!!
      - key is asking the right questions, rather than finding the right answers.
- - - - Different cultural attitudes to knowledge sharing may also affect the type of knowledge that is shared, and whether an organisation places an emphasis on people or technology for knowledge sharing. A focus on people will tend to favour the sharing of tacit knowledge, whereas a focus on technology will favour explicit knowledge sharing.
        
        A majority of organisations in the United States place more emphasis on systems than on people. They ‘rely heavily on information technology to collect, analyse and disseminate knowledge’ (Chase 2002, p. 5). In contrast, Asian organisations ‘tend to favour people over systems. Here the people-based knowledge strategies are augmented and enabled by information technology’. This emphasis is evident in a preference in Asian organisations to focus on ‘individual tacit knowledge and face-to-face collaborative knowledge sharing’. European enterprises ‘… adopt a middle position …’ balancing the roles of people with the value-creation capabilities of information technology (IT) (Chase 2002, p. 5).
    - - Trust is a precondition for any knowledge exchange—motivation is based on trust. Trust is critical for knowledge sharing and collaboration, as this relies primarily on the commitment of individual employees to volunteer their knowledge. As discussed in Module 5, trust results from the confidence generated by an environment of openness and evidence of good faith.
      - Research in this area has cast some doubt on the suitability of financial or other extrinsic rewards for people engaged in knowledge work. Pink (2009) reports on the superiority of intrinsic rewards, and breaks these down into three primary elements:MAP
        
        autonomy;
        
        mastery; and
        
        purpose.
    - - The security of any knowledge-sharing or collaboration technology used inside an organisation should be managed using the same processes as any other ICT and will be the responsibility of the relevant staff. The management of the security of cloud-based systems and systems that include stakeholders outside the organisation may require different processes. Different systems may need different levels of security controls.
      - However, if all the correct elements required for effective knowledge sharing are in place—trust, openness, motivation and an understanding of how the knowledge relates to corporate goals and strategy—then the people concerned will also have a far greater understanding of the nature and importance of the knowledge they are sharing. In this case, the risk of leakage will be far lower than in organisations where this culture is absent.