Knowledge may be accessed at three stages: before, during, or after Knowledge Management-related activities. Different organisations have tried various knowledge capture incentives, including making content submission mandatory and incorporating rewards into performance measurement plans. Considerable controversy exists over whether incentives work or not in this field and no consensus has emerged.

One strategy to Knowledge Management (KM) involves actively managing knowledge (push strategy). In such an instance, individuals strive to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository, such as a database, as well as retrieving knowledge they need that other individuals have provided to the repository.

Another strategy to KM involves individuals making knowledge requests of experts associated with a particular subject on an ad hoc basis (pull strategy). In such an instance, expert individual(s) can provide their insights to the particular person or people who need this (Snowden 2002).

Other knowledge management strategies for companies include:

· Rewards (as a means of motivating for knowledge sharing)
· Storytelling (as a means of transferring tacit knowledge)
· Cross-project learning
· After action reviews
· Knowledge mapping (a map of knowledge repositories within a company accessible by all)
· Communities of practice
· Best practice transfer
· Competence management (systematic evaluation and planning of competences
 of individual organ-isation members)
· Proximity and architecture (the physical situation of employees can be either conducive or obstructive to knowledge sharing)
· Master-apprentice relationship
· Collaborative technologies (groupware, etc)
· Knowledge repositories (databases, etc)
· Measuring and reporting intellectual capital (a way of making explicit knowledge for companies)
· Knowledge brokers (some organisational members take on responsibility for a specific ‘field’ and act as first reference on whom to talk about a specific subject)
· Social software (wikis, social book marking, blogs, etc)

Knowledge Sharing: Conceptual Framework

Knowledge sharing is a systematic process for creating, acquiring, synthesising, learning, sharing and using knowledge and experience to achieve organisational goal. This knowledge can be inside the employees’ minds or stored in paper form in filing cabinets and/or stored in electronic form. As a concept, knowledge sharing is very attractive and many business organisations would prefer to be associated with it. But knowledge sharing implementation is not easy. There are many barriers in knowledge sharing implementations such as organisation culture, lack of understanding the power of knowledge management, fear of IT, immaturity of industry, etc. Above all knowledge management implementation requires sound strategy. For this it is important to make knowledge sharing a distributive system rather than a centralised system. It also requires a platform where the interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge can take place.

Benefits of Knowledge Sharing

An effective knowledge sharing programme should help a company do one or more of the following:
· Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas
· Help in understanding markets and customers
· Development of product and services
· Development of vision and strategies
· Building competencies
· Improve customer service by streamlining response time
· Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster
· Enhance employee retention rates by recognising the value of employee’s knowledge and rewarding them for it
· Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary processes

Barriers to Knowledge Sharing Imple-mentations

There are many barriers to knowledge sharing implementations. The biggest challenge is how to change mindset of people and how to convert the culture from believing that ‘knowledge is power’ to believing that ‘knowledge sharing is power’. Such change is not very easy to establish and requires constant training and development of human resources of the organisations.

In general, Managing Knowledge has been perceived as an unmanageable kind of problem - an implicitly human, individual activity - that was untraceable with traditional management methods and technology. Added to this other barriers are:

• Psychological fear of IT
• Lack of understanding of Power of Knowledge     Management
• Inappropriate decision making and operational     structure
• Lack of simple, easy-to understand-and-  implement powerful tools

According to Enterprise Data warehousing (EDW), a research based organization; the following issues are the greatest barriers to the successful knowledge management implementations:

· Inadequate attention to organisational and human dimensions - change management
· IT cannot solve what is essentially a management problem because it cannot store human intelligence and experience

Why Sharing Knowledge is Important

Today, the creation and application of new knowledge is essential to the survival of almost all businesses. There are many reasons. They include:

· Intangible products - ideas, processes, information are taking a growing share of global trade from the traditional, tangible goods of the manufacturing economy

· Increasingly, the only sustainable competitive advantage is continuous innovation. In other words, the application of new knowledge

· Increasing turn over of staff. People don’t take a job for life any more. When someone leaves an organisation their knowledge walks out of the door with them

· Our problem as an organisation is that we don’t know what we know. Large global or even small geographically dispersed organisations do not know what they know. Expertise learnt and applied in one part of the organisation is not leveraged in another

· Accelerating change - technology, business and social. As things change so does our knowledge base erode – in some businesses, as much of 50% of what we knew five years ago is probably obsolete today?

Knowledge sharing activities are generally supported by knowledge management systems. However, technology constitutes only one of the many factors that affect the sharing of knowledge in organisations, such as organisational culture, trust, and incentives. The sharing of knowledge constitutes a major challenge in the field of knowledge management because some employees tend to resist sharing their knowledge with the rest of the organisation.

One prominent obstacle is the notion that knowledge is property and ownership thus very important. In order to counter this, individuals must be reassured that they would receive some type of incentive for what they create. However, Dalkir (WHO) identified the risk in knowledge sharing is that individuals are most commonly rewarded for what they know, not what they share. If knowledge is not shared, negative consequences such as isolation and resistance to ideas occur. To promote knowledge sharing and remove knowledge sharing obstacles, the organisational culture should encourage discovery and innovation. This would result in the creation of organisational culture trust.

One of the challenges of knowledge management is that of getting people to share their knowledge. Why should people give up their hard-won knowledge, when it is one of their key sources of personal advantage? In some organisations, sharing is natural. In others, the old dictum ‘knowledge is power’ reigns.

Why Don’t People Share?

Some of the common reasons are:

Knowledge is power - It might be the owner-manager of a small company not wanting to lose trade secrets; it may be a particular specialist who has been in the organisation many years and built up his or her own unique way of achieving success without perhaps even understanding the deep tacit knowledge of how they do it. Knowledge is power, but is typically not the primary reason for lack of knowledge sharing.

Not invented here syndrome - is more common. People have pride in not having to seek advice from others and in wanting to discover new ways for themselves. Not realising how useful particular knowledge is to others - an individual may have knowledge used in one situation but be unaware that other people at other times and places might face similar situations. Additionally, knowledge derived for one need may be helpful in totally different contexts; or it may be a trigger for innovation - many innovative developments come from making knowledge connections across different disciplines and organisational boundaries.

Lack of trust - if some knowledge, is shared voluntarily will it be used out of context, wrongly-applied (and then blamed), or pass it off as own without giving any acknowledgement or recognition to the source person?

Lack of time - this is the major reason given in many organisations. There is pressure on productivity, on deadlines, and it’s a general rule that the more knowledgeable you are, there are more people waiting to collar you for the next task. How can you possibly find time to add your lessons learnt to the knowledge database or have a knowledge sharing session with your colleagues?

Other barriers cited by experts include functional silos, individualism, poor means of knowledge capture, inadequate technology, internal competition and top-down decision making. Generally, a mix of structural and infrastructure barriers is exacerbated by the predominance of human ones - social, behavioural and psychological.

How can we overcome such barriers?

Certainly address the issues of organisational structure and inadequate technology. But we need to give our focus to the three Cs of Culture, Co-opetition (a blend of co-operation and competition), and Commitment.

Changing Culture

Culture change is never easy and takes time. But cultures can be changed. Here are some activities that might be used to plan and induce change:

A culture audit - conducting questionnaires, interviews and team sessions with a cross-section of the organisation. This is especially helpful in finding out the difference between what is articulated as the desired culture and what is done (e.g. ‘we put quality first’ but at the same time the organisation ships out less than perfect products at the end of a financial quarter to ‘make the numbers’). It is also common to find several sub-cultures that conflict with overarching goals. Can you clearly identify which values and behaviours conflict with better knowledge sharing and perhaps (more importantly) which people should be the target for change?

Challenge ‘improper’ behaviour - if you identify people hoarding knowledge unnecessarily: challenge them; though avoid knowledge rage.

Involvement - some of the best knowledge sharing cultures are where everybody (even novices and newcomers) believes that their knowledge is respected, valued and used to inform decisions.

Use of role models - identify those people whose behaviours are an example to others. Celebrate and publicise them. Involve them with other groups.

Team-building / organisation development sessions - at regular team meetings, allocate time to understand and improve internal processes; too many meetings are task and output focused, but fail to address the means of achieving successful outcomes.

Align rewards and recognition to support appropriate behaviours - too many schemes are based on seniority or individual expertise, rather than team effectiveness.

Change people - move the knowledge sharers around; get industrial psychologists and behavioural experts on board after all, it is quality of leadership that will enable all the other culture change techniques to achieve their aims.

Challenging Through Competition

Human beings are at the same time social cooperative beings and have a competitive streak. We all like to do better than our peers and excel in something. Yet, in today’s complex world, we need help from them to achieve our aims. In an organisation, lack of competition - both for individuals and teams - leads to complacency. But competition must be done in a healthy manner. Some things to consider:

In early stages of product development, don’t simply approve one line of approach. Have several ‘competing’ projects under way but make sure there are mechanisms to exchange knowledge and challenge / encourage each ‘runner’ e.g. through people sharing, peer reviews etc.

Introduce ‘competitions’, such as the ‘knowledge champion of the year’, the ‘innovators team award’, but invite everybody to the award ceremonies.
Compete, not against other people or teams, but set goals vs. challenging targets or external competitors.
Above all, let the apparent losers of such competitions share in success, celebrate what they have achieved, and make them feel part of the winning team (the wider organisation).

Commitment

This builds on the other two C’s organisations need to create a commitment to culture, to change, to challenge, to compete and cooperate. If, as is often the case, time pressure leads to poor knowledge sharing, then there must be a commitment to allow time for it to happen. Budget 5% of a project’s resources to distilling lessons and sharing. Include time to contribute to knowledge development and sharing in people’s job goals (and in the accompanying reward system). Build commitment into team processes. Commitment to knowledge sharing must be demonstrated throughout the organisation. It is apparent through what the leaders of the organisation say and do. It is shown by commitment in the organisations’ processes, reward systems, development programmes etc. It is, above all, shown by individual throughout the organisation being committed to share their knowledge with others even if it is not formally part of their ‘day job’.

Seven Incentives for Sharing

Knowledgeable people do like to share their expertise - it’s just something about their work environment that discourages this natural inclination.
Larry Stevens, of Knowledge Management Magazine (the one published by CurtCo Freedom Press) in October 2000, cited seven incentives for sharing.

· Hire people who will share
· Develop trust
· Vary motivations
· Show public recognition
· Reorganize for sharing 
· Create communities 
· Develop leaders 

In order to enrich a company’s current culture, David Gurteen believes that change must start at the individual. Every employee has a sphere of influence along with their own individual knowledge, and this is where he believes a knowledge sharing culture can begin.

Creating a Knowledge Sharing Culture

The most effective way to create a knowledge sharing culture – is first to start to practice it at your level. The higher up the organisation, the more effective you would be in changing the culture but even if you are low down the hierarchy – you have an influence. Second, put in place the knowledge sharing technology and train and educate people in its effective use. The two together – people with the appropriate knowledge sharing mindset and the appropriate knowledge sharing technology to support them would rapidly bring about a knowledge sharing culture that helps you better meet your business objectives.

Conclusion

Knowledge sharing as a concept is very attractive and provides huge business opportunities that should not be missed. It is an engine that transforms knowledge into business value. However, implementation of knowledge sharing is not easy. Organisations have to grapple with various issues and challenges such as organisational culture, strategy, information technology, knowledge organisation, etc. Despite all these issues and challenges companies worldwide have shown keen interest in knowledge sharing. As far as India is concerned knowledge sharing is still in its infancy. It has to cover a lot of ground to come up to the level of knowledge sharing implementation. In India, there is a need for National Knowledge Sharing Concept to create and harness the knowledge of our own people and start creating and using our own software packages. The core competency definitely exists in our R&D laboratories, academic, institutions, software houses and industries. Learning from past mistakes, time has come to amend and take knowledge sharing as the concept in the right direction and reap its benefits to the fullest.
(This is the concluding part of the article. The first part appeared in the August issue titled Managing Knowledge, an Art.)