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Knowledge Sharing: In Practice

Knowledge sharing comes intuitively as a social aspect of our professional lives. When we need to know something we naturally gravitate toward those with whom we feel most comfortable in order to get the answers to our question. And we gain knowledge because of this informal knowledge network — comprised of those willing to impart and share their knowledge — and then pass on what we know to others.

But knowledge sharing has always been largely a loose and subjective matter. Trying to formalize and layer with technology what had previously been maintained (and I use the term "maintained" very loosely) only informally by way of our interpersonal relationships with colleagues and clients is no easy task.

There are three main hurdles that must be overcome in order to successfully implement a knowledge sharing initiative:

• Technology: The medium used to support knowledge sharing.
• Process: The definition of a specific business process oriented goal (as opposed to the generalized "knowledge management system")
• Culture: Understanding the collective mindset of the organization

Technology as a Medium for Knowledge Sharing

I've chosen to discuss technology first because it's the easiest hurdle to overcome (process and culture will be discussed in the second part of this series). Unlike the other two, technology is more of a physical impediment than a cognitive one. It can be controlled and, to a certain extent, is predictable.

It may seem to some that technology and humanity have always been at odds with one another, that the former is a ghastly byproduct of the latter's attempt to make lives less stressful. Ironically — based on the amount of people who solve computer-related problems with the primordial fist to the screen — it has accomplished the exact opposite and, in fact, made many lives even more stressful.

Technology-based knowledge sharing will fail if there's no easy way to translate this highly social element of corporate life and culture into bits and bytes. And as such, the technology used to facilitate knowledge sharing must be intuitive and end-user friendly. Content owners and knowledge bearers tasked with the responsibility of populating the system must have a quick and simple way to input information because the easier it is for them to manage their content, the more likely they will be to do so.

You should take steps to "hide" as much of the technological aspects of the knowledge sharing system as possible. This can include:

• The use of design templates or style sheets (CSS) to maintain system standards.

• Providing content owners with an online input form capable of automatically filing and formatting documents (i.e., parsing documents of unnecessary white space, formatting headers, placing date/time stamps, etc...)

• Scheduled auto-archiving routines to clean up older information so that content owners don't have to do this type of housekeeping manually.

(See my previous articles "Creating a Controlled Management Environment" and "Keeping Your Content Owners... Content" for much more on this subject.)

Of course, adequate training must also be provided to support content owners in this knowledge sharing initiative.

With these components in place, their focus will be on the content rather than the technology used to maintain that content. Over time, after the initial learning curve or adjustment period, the process of converting their personal knowledge and inputting it into a knowledge sharing system will become second nature to them — like an instructor teaching a classroom full of students.

The New Face of Online Knowledge Sharing?

Many of us are already familiar with traditional "parent-child" knowledge sharing intranets where information is managed and processed by a core group of content owners (the parents) and then published for the user community (the children). But recently, a newer, albeit controversial, technology has come into the limelight with a "peer-to-peer" knowledge sharing approach: wikis, blogs, and klogs. I refer to these as peer-to-peer systems because, unlike a parent-child approach, it's the end-user community itself that's providing and managing the content.

Wikis, such as the famous Wikipedia, are unique server-based collaborative knowledge management systems that allow any reader to add and edit content. Wikis are basically open door systems where all readers can be contributors as well; they have the ability to update the site's content whether it's theirs or not.

Blogs (also known as Web logs) and klogs ("knowledge Web logs" aimed at knowledge management initiatives) allow individual users or groups to maintain ongoing (usually daily) diary-like postings that can be read and commented on by all employees. These tools do a great job of "humanizing" the technology used for knowledge sharing because they represent the voice and personality of the author. But unlike wikis, blog, and klog entries can only be edited by the author.

Wikis, blogs, and klogs are heralded as productive, community-based brain-dumps by their proponents and cursed as unmanageable and unorganized by their detractors. While these tools have gained a lot of momentum on the Internet, the jury is still out on whether they should be used within the enterprise.

Parent-child systems are very structured; they take a top-down approach so that the accuracy of the content being posted has passed through a "filtering" process. But with wikis, blogs, and klogs — unless a proper usage policy and framework is explicitly defined — there may be no formal content quality assurance short of the integrity of the person doing the posting.

To Be Continued...

Users' perception of a formalized, technology-based knowledge sharing system may seem counterintuitive — especially to those who don't work with computers on a regular basis. But technology is merely a tool to support something we've done for years. We share our knowledge by working closely with those around us and they, in turn, impart that knowledge onto others. If an intuitive knowledge sharing system is implemented, this person-to-person cooperation will be enhanced, not substituted, with technology.

In the second part of this series on the facts and myths of knowledge sharing, I'll be discussing a more difficult hurdle to overcome: the cognitive and cultural impediments that prevent successful knowledge sharing.

Read Part Two of this series at: http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200502/ij_02_22_05a.html.