Bringing People Together―It Takes More Than an Intranet

摘要

There is a considerable amount of interest of late in "collaborative working" and "communities of practice." I have a sense that, in many organizations, these terms are the acceptable face of Knowledge Management! KM does seem to have fallen from grace and I have to admit that I have a problem with Knowledge Management as a discipline, and am much happier talking about knowledge exchange. The scale of adoption of communities of practice in many organizations is quite breathtaking. The justification for an intranet is often that it will facilitate the exchange of knowledge within the organization, but in reality the benefits are rarely on the anticipated scale. There are two reasons for this: The first is that the culture of the organization, or even of a specific department, runs counter to the ethos of collaboration. You can sometimes see this in pharmaceutical companies, where the R&D scientists are keen to exchange ideas, whereas sales teams see only the potential loss of commission if good sales techniques or customer knowledge are widely shared. The second is that an intranet, on its own, is not a very good platform for the exchange of knowledge.