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"Share everything." So says Robert Fulghum in his book "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Sadly, for many, it's a concept that hasn't translated well into adulthood.

Parents have always tried to teach their children to share things with siblings and schoolyard chums. They try to remain patient when their kids pull a tantrum, declaring with all the determination of a hungry bear that their toys are, "Mine! Mine! MINE!!!" But despite all that preaching, once the kids are sent to school, the gloves come off and it's their turn to cry, "Mine! Mine! MINE!!!" At the office, large amounts of professional knowledge are squirreled away even though this information will be beneficial to a wider audience — perhaps on the corporate intranet. However, it stays in workers' heads, on their computers, or in their desk drawers.

While the possibilities for intranet applications have grown innumerably with the advances in technology, it's still most often used as the backbone for knowledge sharing. The systems that succeed are reflections of the cooperation and willingness of an organization's staff to share their knowledge. Similarly, those that fail may reflect a shortcoming in those respects. The deathblow of many knowledge sharing intranets is not the tool itself, because that's merely a vehicle to transport and carry the knowledge and information to the masses. Rather, the coup de grâce is a lack of community, the lack of a cooperative knowledge network.

So why keep knowledge to yourself when it can benefit the organization as a whole? Is it for job security? Is it to maintain power? Is it to gain personal advantage over those not in the know?

Children may not have a natural tendency to share and may hoard things they perceive as their rightful property. But they don't do this with any malicious intent or egotistic self-promotion. They're far too young to even comprehend such motives; and this lack of sharing is something they will most likely grow out of. So why do they do it? Simple, they do it — and here's the big point — because they're children, what's your excuse?

Knowledge Sharing: In Theory

Every company has somewhat isolated "pockets" of knowledge that are represented by employees throughout the organization's various departments and workgroups. These pockets usually don't stray too far beyond their own small circles. But there may very well be a large portion of the corporate population who will also benefit from this expertise and knowledge — unfortunately, they may never know it exists.

Employees from other departments or remote offices, could be climbing the walls trying to figure out a problem when the answers already exist from within the organization. And as employees of the same company, you would think that there should be a mechanism for the dissemination of this information. This is where knowledge sharing systems come into play.

Traditionally, knowledge sharing has always taken place informally and manifests itself in many forms — whether you're aware of it or not. It happens when you pass a colleague in the hallway and ask them their opinion on a problem; when you solicit user feedback on a project or topic; when you're in roundtable meetings with colleagues; even when you're at the local pub on a Friday night sharing the week's office war stories.

There's little permanence in this type of knowledge sharing, however. Knowledge is passed from mouth to mouth with little permanent record. And when knowledge bearers leave an organization, they take all their expertise with them. The only hope is that they imparted enough of their knowledge onto the remaining staff so that they can continue to carry on this information life cycle.

Intranet technology sought to change this — to give this valuable, albeit ethereal, mass of knowledge a permanent place to reside within the organization. Knowledge sharing intranets tear down the figurative walls that confine information within small corporate cliques and makes it much more widely available to large audiences.

The idea is sound: A knowledge network with multiple points of content entry maintained in a centralized location. Based on intranet architecture, the information would be made widely available to all employees, thus substantiating an organization's knowledge and giving it some sense of longevity.

Knowledge sharing systems don't have to start from scratch either; the knowledge already exists in the form of the knowledge pockets I mentioned earlier. Developers only need to develop a framework in which to consolidate, manage, and publish all this information. The goal here is to allow an organization to tap into the collective knowledge of its employees in a centralized environment with a distributed model of knowledge management.

On paper, all this looks great. But the fact of the matter is, reality paints a less than Utopian picture.