The Power of Knowledge Sharing in Organizations



by Jeff De Cagna, Guest Editor

In a 1998 California Management Review article, Liam Fahey and Larry Prusak argue, "If knowledge is not something that is different from data or information, then there is nothing new or interesting in knowledge management." Unfortunately, three years later, many still steadfastly refuse to draw the distinction between "information" and "knowledge." Well, I believe the time has come.

The major difference between information and knowledge is people. Information is plentiful on the Web, in books, manuals, documents, and, yes, even in people. But whereas information can exist separately from people, knowledge does not. As John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid write in The Social Life of Information, "knowledge entails a knower," whether a person, team, network or community. Knowledge is an extraordinary blend of judgment, insight, intuition, and inspiration created through on-going learning and reflection on practice. While information tells us "what," knowledge tells us "how" and "why."

Living by this distinction demands a fundamentally different approach to working with knowledge in today's organizations. Although many firms continue to spend millions of unrecoverable dollars on the latest technologies in a doomed-from-the-start effort to capture and warehouse "knowledge," the tide is beginning to turn as the intellectual bankruptcy of the techno-centric management approach is revealed.

In this month's Information Outlook we offer four articles to help shed some light on the critical role that people play in knowledge creation and sharing. SLA member Cheryl Lamb of Buckman Labs describes how information professionals can help to create a more collaborative environment in which knowledge sharing can flourish. Seth Kahan from The World Bank offer us a glimpse of the power of storytelling in building community and knowledge transfer. Nancy Dixon, author of Common Knowledge and faculty director of SLA's Knowledge Champions Institute, examines the challenge of determining what is true, i.e., which knowledge created inside an organization is valid and can be applied in other situations. And, in a special interview with IO, leading knowledge management thinker Larry Prusak shares his perspectives on "social capital" and the state of knowledge activities in business today.

SLA's Strategic Learning and Development Center, in partnership with Information Outlook, wants to help you create your organization's knowledge future. We hope that this issue will challenge your thinking on the direction of knowledge activities in your organization and the role you can play in them. We urge you to share your feedback with us. Let us know what you think about what you read in these pages by e-mail at learning@sla.org. We look forward to engaging you in an on-going conversation on the future of knowledge sharing in the months ahead. Knowledge can help us unlock the potential of our organizations, but only if all of us are prepared to change the way we think and the way we act.