Posted by Richard on December 19, 1999 at 06:18:17:

In Reply to: Re: Knowledge Elicitation & Resistant Culture posted by al.taylor on December 17, 1999 at 05:42:13:

Taylor,

I have a much better question to ask!!!

What cultural problem are you refering to?.

Your mr. Wilf here seems quite convinsed that there is a problem in getting people to share their knowledge, and that this is the big issue in the "culture debate".

I have been dealing with organizational cultures for more than a decade now, and I have spend the last couple of years doing research in companies on "knowledge" sharing.

I have never (never) encountered problems with willingness to share "knowledge". It seems though that it has turned out to be a convention among KM practitioners that this is the case.

In order to get in to the real problem about "knowledge" sharing, you have to lay a completely different perspective!.

Here are some of my facts of findings:

- You cannot share knowledge, but you can share information.
- All information is political, everything you say or write has a political aim or purpose.
- Any organization has several cultures and subcultures.
- These cultures are shared communities of practice, that are constructing isolated knowledge locally.
- Basic understandings in one community are hence different from the basic understandings in another community in the same organisation.
- Differences in basic understandings makes it difficult to communicate between different communities.
- You cannot merge cultures, they reproduce themselves and they only change fragmentally over time.
- KM is about managing multiple cultural patterns.
- Information technology is a tool you can put into use when you are capable of doing that, but it cannot help you do it!.

Having all of you to understand this is a hopeless task, and my only hopes are for you to start thinking about this and consider it possible.

This is my perspective and my results are highly recognised among companies like Nokia, Ericsson and parts of IBM.

BR
RIchard

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Knowledge Elicitation & Resistant Culture allan taylor 06:27:03 12/21/99 (1)
  • Re: Knowledge Elicitation & Resistant Culture Richard 10:41:37 12/21/99 (0)

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