Knowledge Sharing

Many organizations are built on Knowledge that exists within them in various forms. The most important resource of knowledge is the learning and experience of people.

Where does the knowledge reside?
Does this get transferred formally or informally?
Does everyone get to know everything about the organization and what's going on within it?

It is well known that the success of a Person/Team/Organization depends largely on knowledge sharing which is considered part of 'Team Work' by many large organizations. Often team work through knowledge sharing results in winning and delivering great client service.

Now, let's attempt to define a few types of knowledge in a professional services environment that may be useful to people in working towards the organization's goals.

Professionals can benefit from knowledge created around various areas of functions in an Organization. They could be:

- Best practices in various areas of service
- Knowledge on tools and methods
- White papers on technology
- Process knowledge
- Industry knowledge
- Point of view - statistics and analysis
- Firm capabilities etc.

These are a few of the many areas where professionals need reference to prior work in any new task or project.

When all this 'Collective Knowledge' is captured and made available through well defined processes, it enhances performance and helps build an effective practice in any area of work. ‘Collective Knowledge’ is made available to the stakeholders via tools such as databases that are used to store information in an organized fashion. This can be categorized as a formal method of knowledge sharing. While there is another way in which it is done conventionally and is called informal knowledge sharing. Informal knowledge sharing is confined to the boundaries of what is called ‘Social Network’. This is a network which people establish by interacting with individuals that share similar views. However, there are apparent limitations of following just the informal knowledge sharing method to achieve Organizational goals.

One of the challenges of knowledge management is that of getting people to share their knowledge in a professional environment. Very few people share their best practices with the firm's knowledge bases. Knowledge professionals need to implement various strategies to get people to contribute to the knowledge base. Regular communications requesting people to share their intellectual property, launching organization wide intellectual property collection drives and internal marketing of the existing technology platform and processes are a few ways to achieve the task of capturing explicit knowledge. A few organizations have put in place a knowledge sharing and intellectual capital policy to get their professionals to commit to sharing work related knowledge.
The ultimate goal of these activities is to equip professionals with easily retrievable organizational knowledge or meta-knowledge.

The power of knowledge is experienced only when it gets transferred formally and informally.
In my experience with knowledge sharing I realized that many teams had benefited greatly from receiving advice and information on various areas such as Sales, Concept Presentations, Data Presentation to name a few. This effort often helps in minimizing the time and effort that is involved in starting something from scratch.