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Monday, June 24, 2002 |
Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Management
I'm listening to a presentation by Josey Chu, who's doing her Ph.D. research on knowledge sharing from the employee's perspective (not management). About 110 of us answered a survey on knowledge management practices at DoIT.Background and Terms - "Knowledge Sharing" is about the behavior; knowledge management is about how you facilitate the behavior.
Some knowledge is explicit (how to assemble a PC); other knowledge is tacit (how to debug code). Tacit knowledge is more difficult to capture and transfer; it's what Josey was interested in.
Buying and installing a product like Lotus Notes provides a way to store and transfer knowledge -- it's a knowledge management solution, but it does nothing to encourage the behavior of knowledge sharing itself. Why do employees suddenly take time to do something which costs them time and effort for no obvious reward?
Lots of hindrances: people think of knowledge as job security and power; even if you are willing to share, you don't know who needs the knowledge. Elsewhere, people don't know who has the knowledge.
People are less willing to share knowledge readily than management often thinks. Her research focus is: from an employee's perspective, what factors affect knowledge sharing?
Interesting; those of us here at DoIT do not feel a loss of power or job security when we share knowlege; over 90% of our management is perceived to be helpful in encouraging sharing and searching for solutions. However, many people perceive very little direct reward or appreciation for knowledge sharing (this is similar to the results in the other organizations she surveyed here in Madison, which include a successful dot com, a medical company and a big engineering firm. Common rewards are perceived to be verbal praise, social recognition, encouragement, etc.; money is not perceived to be common.
Unique to DoIT: people say "I do share knowledge"; with one exception, the other organizations don't self-report this actual sharing (as opposed to being willing to share).
Our (DoIT's) ideas are not generally considered "intellectual property"; trade secrets and patents may play a part in the cultural differences between DoIT and other groups. Similarly, we have better job security. Many of us have year to year contracts, while others have civil service positions which allow them to transfer to similar jobs elsewhere in state government in the case of a layoff; this is a big difference between us and the private sector.
In general, people she surveyed don't think that trust is needed (all of the organizations surveyed were big organizations, implying you get a lot of requests for help from relative strangers), but most of us think that social interaction is important and that past experiences with a person influence your willingness to share. Sometimes, people want to avoid becoming a pseudo "help desk" when that isn't their job.
Knowledge is more distributed than in the past: we don't have room for a lot of drones supported by a few "experts": every person is expected to be the knowledgeable person in some area. The jobs the drones used to do are now handled by voicemail, accounting systems, spreadsheets, etc.
A comment she got: this is a government agency; pay increments are not tied to things like knowledge sharing (true: it's clear that the most important determination of your pay raise is the state budget battle in the legislature every two years, not anything you do. There's a small variation due to performance but the state system allows for relatively little room to give big rewards to star performers.
She's worked with Erikssen in Sweden: they have a lounge where employees can get together and socialize every afternoon, with coffee and treats at management expense. She got solutions at those events (someone who could hook her up with the true expert). In contrast, we don't have this sort of facility (true: they've steadily filled up these spaces as the space demands grow but our building does not. The old copy/fax room near my office, for example, is now an office, with the equipment shoved down into a nearby hallway alcove.) One group that's housed out of our building has been running an informal table (paying for food themselves, etc.) as a way to cope with their physical isolation from the main building.
We are inconsistent on the issue of whether we have a place to socialize. Our coffee rooms are poor for socializing, but we have some informal spots like the sandwich shop and the Student Union's grill room that are on either side of us. My own group has held a breakfast staff meeting at the Union's grill room for several years; now that we have wireless access points at the Union, it's a better facility than at least half of our conference rooms.
Interesting problem coming up for everyone: what happens to the necessary trust and feedback as telecommuting increases? (Though I have some hope, based on the success of the blogging community and the open source community, two fine examples of public spirited knowledge sharing).
