How do we get business professionals to share information? This question has been at the heart of most knowledge management efforts for the past 10 years. By sharing, we do not mean, "Hey Bob, can you email me that file?" This is an approach most often used in our current information hoarding environment, in which one's personal information resources are used to generate power and influence. We are talking about the type of information sharing that leads to a real organizational leveraging of resources - this requires that information is ubiquitously available to those who need it. How do we get this?
Last year, at
CPweek, this question eventually centered around problems with shared drives. The point was made that shared drives are impersonal in nature, that once you post your information there, you essentially lose control over it. You don't know who accesses it, whether the informaiton will be deleted or changed, and really no longer manage or own this information in any real sense. Overtime, we find shared drives best characterized as ast information junkyards, with wonderfully interesting knowledge nuggets buried next to mounds of out-of-date digital blather. Often key directories will be named after employees that left the organization years ago. This approach does not work.
Pat Stubbs pointed out that often we hold back posting our information, and instead wait for people to ask for it as a way to strenthen our social networks. Social networks based on reciprocity and mutual trust develop over time through the exchanging of valuable information in a close hold fashion. This allows the information owners to translate their knowledge into a social currency that leads to their continued professional advancement. Yet this approach, while beneficial on the individual level, does not aid the larger organization in leveraging its expertise. How do we approach this issue in a meaningful way to create a new and meaningful information sharing environment?
The answer lies in a combination of themes: Information owners must retain real ownership of their resources in this new information sharing environment while at the same time allowing the larger organization the ability to use and manage this information in some meaningful way. Information owners must have the ability to see who has accessed their resources, how many times it was accessd, and how it was eventually used. If this is done in a transparent, social way, this will allow the owner access to a far larger potential social network then they ever had in a P2P informaiton sharing world. At the same time, groups in the organization must be able to marshall an information owner's resources in different and meaningful ways - often far different than were ever envisioned by the information owner.
In a nutshell the goal should be individual ownership, but organizational management of information.
