Knowledge Sharing: At the Heart of Knowledge Management

Knowledge sharing is central to knowledge management in organizations. The more tacit the knowledge, the harder it is to share. However, successful knowledge sharing means looking not just at the content of the knowledge, and the people and technology concerned in the sharing, but the context in which that sharing takes place. This chapter discusses relevant theories from knowledge management and other fields. It goes on to present a model covering the time, place and context of the knowledge sharing activity, developed using theories about decision support systems. This forms the final part of a three-stage approach intended to help managers (and others) make decisions about how to support knowledge sharing activities in organizations. Each stage takes the form of a question to be answered, as follows: 1) What are the business processes concerned? 2) What is the knowledge to be shared related to - knowledge creation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge refinement, knowledge storage, or knowledge use? 3) What does this mean for the time, place and context of the knowledge sharing?