#knowledge culture

[sparkcrafters]

Purposeful sharing

Many people have many ideas. However, what does not get shared might be forgotten. Trapped in an abyss of a messy bunch of neurons at the back of your head which will never see the light of day... Now, what’s the use in that?

Sharing is important and the more people think about our ideas - the better! Through sharing, ideas can grow into actions, and we need others in order to make things happen.

We cherish this sense of generous sharing & collaborative approach to people and resources – both internally as well as externally. There is nothing secretive about ‘PBI think’: we enjoy dishing out what we know and are always looking to do more cross-company training sessions.

Calling all PBI & friends: We want to open up and learn to be more inviting to external people, to join in whenever something interesting is happening, whether that be during our Ethno meet ups or our internal sessions. Our Friday sessions would be a fantastic opportunity to invite our friends from outside of the company to come in and keep us all on our toes and wearing our thinking caps with pride!

So give us a call (+49 (0) 30 - 34 74 720 – 10), drop us a mail ([email protected]), or tweet us (@sparkCRAFTers)…that is if you can get it down in 140 characters :). Let’s get our heads together and help ideas become actions.

 //DT @dottitoellner

[wkwami]

whither a knowledge sharing culture

John Moore on how the government's post-9/11 approach to KM helps keep the US attack free: 

Accordingly, knowledge management practices expanded to accommodate more ways to aggregate and share critical information. From an architectural point of view, installations are less monolithic. Single knowledge repositories are giving way to multiple databases. Agencies may wield a number of collaboration tools to curate intelligence insights as opposed to a single, specifically designated knowledge management system.

The departure from monolithic installations is also evident in the system-of-systems nature of post-9/11 knowledge management. A deployment now might include portals, collaboration products, unified communications systems and social media tools. Because many agencies have some or all of those elements already in place, the focus of knowledge management shifts from acquiring a purpose-built system to harnessing existing resources.

“Everyone has a big ‘aha!’ moment when they realize they have all the pieces but just need to put them together in a different way,” said Holm, who listed portals, collaboration capabilities and search among the key elements of knowledge management.

Technology is but one aspect of any KM initiative, the other being a knowledge sharing culture. The biggest impediment to many KM initiatives is knowledge hoarding within an organization (employees might hoard knowledge as a key to their own job security and/or advancement). Was knowledge hoarding a problem, and how was that resolved? Unfortunately, the article does not delve deeper into that aspect.

In organizations where knowledge hoarding is pervasive, KM initiatives tend to be dead on arrival, with such 'aha' moments never materializing even as useful knowledge rots away in 'protected' territorial silos. How then do you engender a knowledge sharing culture? It remains to be seen whether a knowledge sharing culture can be mandated into existence.