Sharing knowledge: Sharing and managing knowledge among Department of Defense consultants.

摘要

Information Technology Services Program (ITSP) consultants provide support to the Department of Defense in a variety of areas. The ITSP contract was created to fill a void within the Department of Defense personnel system. Each phase of the acquisition cycle requires a specific expertise and when lacking it, the Department of Defense must fill that void from outside the Department of Defense talent pool.;Strategic leaders are challenged everyday to develop pathways through which knowledge can be transferred to people and to create business units where that knowledge can be developed and used to pursue strategic competitiveness. At a time when the Department of Defense is stressing integrated and interoperable systems, and attempting to have companies understand the importance of sharing their knowledge, they encounter competing firms unwilling or unable to share knowledge because of a variety of reasons. This has always been an extremely competitive area, but now more so than ever and herein lies the problem.;Knowledge gives a company a competitive advantage, so they are not eager to share their knowledge. The outcome of not sharing knowledge results in a lack of integration, duplication of work efforts, longer learning curves for employees, loss of business opportunities and a weakening of the individual companies to provide a more integrated solution to the problem areas they are employed to solve. The analysis presented here examined the sharing of knowledge among ITSP consultants and how they share and manage their knowledge.;Statistical methods included descriptive statistics which presented quantitative descriptions and correlation analysis with ordinal variables: To determine how much the variable co-varied or how strongly they were related to each other.;Results indicated that the sharing of knowledge between ITSP consultant and their customers, clients and other professionals is a crucial element in their quest to obtain and share knowledge; the process was hindered by the lack of an overall company strategy or vision to sharing and managing knowledge, as well having a designated repository for the knowledge obtained. Seven areas of focus for improvement were identified.