KM7 Overcoming cultural barriers to sharing knowledge

PART I

1. Culture is often seen as the key inhibitor of effective knowledge sharing.
2. Potential users said that they liked share system online, but just didn't have time for it.
3. Sharing was not built into the culture enough for people to actually take the time to do it.
4. However strong your commitment and approach to knowledge management, your culture is stronger.
5. Companies that successfully implement knowledge management do not try to change their culture to fit their knowledge management approach.
6. We defined culture as the shared values, beliefs and practice of the people in the organization.
7. The main reason knowledge management progams fail is a lack of a clear connection with a business goal.
8. It is the most important for the style of your effort to match how things get done in your organization.
9. Link these invisible values and visible elements of knowledge management is the behavior of peer and managers.

PART II

Culture is often seen as the key inhibitor of effective knowledge sharing. This paper interview 5 companies to find their organization culture.

Culture of organization can split into two dimensions - visible and invisible. The visible one is like espouse values, philosophy or mission. Even the stories, space and sturcture of one company is also regard as visible culture. And the invisible cultures such as their simple precepts are seen but unspoken background of the company.

Although culture affect knowledge sharing deeply, companies need not to change their culture to fit knowledge approach. Because culture is the foundation of a company, it is stronger as well. Instead, try to make KM approachs to fit your own culture and existent network, in addition, to let your employee get used to them. It will exert knowledge management more successfully.

PART III

TOPIC: Organizational Culture

This paper didn't define the organizational cuture clearly. But after Dr.Pheobe's interpretion, I knew more about this paper.

We can observe Organizational Culture by three things, that are atifacts & behaviors, values and assumptions. These three things is like an onion's skins. From the outside to inside is as the order above. These three can be split into visible and invisible dimension as well.

PART IV

I think there is only one insight in this paper, that is, building KM on solving problems.

And in my opinion, that's OK even your culture need to fit KM approach, if you can really solve problems and get profit from KM. Because, as a whole, there are still number of companies do not have that kind culture which suit to fit KM. In this case, the company need to create a new one for KM approachs.

The conclusions were only made from the companies which have knowledge sharing already. This is the biggest blind part of this paper, the authors didn't considered about other companies which have not had KM yet.

There is another interesting thing, that is, don't let your employees feel you are undergoing KM activities. Make KM approach as a routine of their work, and encourage them to get used to. I agree with it, and I think if the employees know what you required is about KM at first, they will feel overloaded. But I still think it is need to let them know what is KM step by step. It may make them agree more what you did.