Building Knowledge Sharing Communities

It is difficult for organizations to effectively manage personal knowledge so it can be mobilized, shared, and rewarded to benefit the organization. The difficulties are compounded in large organizations where people with potentially valuable knowledge are unknown to one another and dispersed geographically. Issues that are potentially amenable to management include identification, indexing and codification of the knowledge held in people’s heads, and the cultural issues of discovery, mutual trust and sharing at the personal level. A large engineering and project management organization (“EPMO”) has prototyped a methodology to graphically codify, index and map staff knowledge using mind mapping technologies. Not only does the methodology provide a graphical structure making it easy for staff to determine who is likely to posses the kind of knowledge they need to find, but interview process is an important facilitator to precondition the knowledge bearers for sharing, and the content of the resulting maps tends to present the knowledge bearers in a more humanized way.

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