Capturing vs. Sharing knowledge

An example of the difficulty of capturing and sharing knowledge.

In this story you work in customer service, and you've found a great way to use Twitter for helping your customers.

Company A:

"This would be great for the rest of our team", you say to your boss. "Great - please share it with them", he says, giving you a link to some guidelines using Microsoft Dynamics CRM (look at the example before continuing with this story (cached))).

You read the best practices, find the correct article template (you think, after looking through the various templates) and then follow the instructions for creating an article. Soon after you're ready to write the tips in an article, and then you save and close it.

You submit the article to your boss for approval, and three days later you get a message from your boss that the article is rejected. "I didn't understand it - I don't even know what Twitter is ! Please add some more information about it", your boss says.

You go to Wikipedia, copy some information and paste it into the article (after checking the instructions for how to find the article draft and edit it). You then re-submit the article for approval, and a week later (your boss was on a seminar) the article is approved, and 15 minutes later it is available in the knowledge base.

In the meantime, you've told your coworkers about the tip during a lunch break, but it turns out they already knew it (but didn't bother to enter it into the knowledge base).

"Oh well, at least newly hired will gain something from this", you think to yourself (and two months later, your company closes all access to Twitter "for security reasons").

Company B:

"This is a great way to use Twitter", you think to yourself. You hit F12 to activate iKnow, enter "Twitter" and create a new note (Ctrl+N). You enter the tip so you'll remember it, and hit F12 to minimize iKnow.

You go to lunch and tell your coworkers about the tip. "Oh, we already knew that", they say, "and you can also do this..." and they explain an even better use than you'd thought of.

When you get back from lunch, you hit F12, enter "Twi" (iKnow will suggest "Twitter") and press Enter to open the note. You add the new tip, and hit F12 to minimize iKnow.

Summary:

Capturing knowledge is quick and easy using iKnow. You capture what you need, in your own words.

Sharing knowledge is not possible using iKnow. Sharing knowledge is a much more difficult problem than capturing knowledge, because you need to consider
- if anyone else would need it,
- who would need it,
- how long it is valid/useful,
- where it should be stored for others to find it, and
- how it should be presented for others to use it.

The guidelines described in this example for company A may be well suited for knowledge-sharing in large organizations, as sharing knowledge correctly is hard.

Use iKnow to capture knowledge. Use IM, e-mail, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Lotus Notes, CRM etc to share it. But start with capturing the knowledge - you cannot share something you don't have...