Knowledge Sharing

Knowledge sharing is an activity through which knowledge (i.e. information, skills, or expertise) is exchanged among people, friends, or members of a family, a community (e.g. Wikipedia) or an organization. Organizations have recognized that knowledge constitutes a valuable intangible asset for creating and sustaining competitive advantages. Knowledge sharing activities are generally supported by knowledge management systems. However, technology constitutes only one of the many factors that affect the sharing of knowledge in organizations, such as organizational culture, trust, and incentives.


The sharing of knowledge constitutes a major challenge in the field of knowledge management because some employees tend to resist sharing their knowledge with the rest of the organization.One prominent obstacle is the notion that knowledge is property and ownership thus very important. In order to counteract this, individuals must be reassured that they will receive some type of incentive for what they create. However, Dalkir identified the risk in knowledge sharing is that individuals are most commonly rewarded for what they know, not what they share. If knowledge is not shared, negative consequences such as isolation and resistance to ideas occur.


To promote knowledge sharing and remove knowledge sharing obstacles, the organizational culture should encourage discovery and innovation. This will result in the creation of organizational culture trust.Knowledge may be accessed at three stages: before, during, or after KM-related activities. Different organisations have tried various knowledge capture incentives, including making content submission mandatory and incorporating rewards into performance measurementplans. Considerable controversy exists over whether incentives work or not in this field and no consensus has emerged.


One strategy to Knowledge Management involves actively managing knowledge (push strategy). In such an instance, individuals strive to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository, such as a database, as well as retrieving knowledge they need that other individuals have provided to the repository.Early Knowledge Management technologies included online corporate yellow pages as expertise locators and document management systems. Combined with the early development of collaborative technologies (in particular Lotus Notes), KM technologies expanded in the mid-1990s. Subsequent KM efforts leveraged semantic technologies for search and retrieval and the development of e-learning tools for communities of practice.


More recently, development of social computing tools (such as blogs and wikis) have allowed more unstructured, self-governing or ecosystem approaches to the transfer, capture and creation of knowledge, including the development of new forms of communities, networks, or matrixed organisations. However such tools for the most part are still based on text and code, and thus represent explicit knowledge transfer. These tools face challenges in distilling meaningful re-usable knowledge and ensuring that their content is transmissible through diverse channels.