05 Nov 2012
If any organization across the world is being looked at, then it can be seen that almost all of them have enhanced their organizational capabilities by means of knowledge sharing. This is a process, through which existing and accumulated knowledge earned via expertise, education, and experience is spread across several divisions of organization. Top leadership and management team of any organization always encourage the employees in sharing their knowledge via formal and informal routes, and there are several reasons behind doing so.
- Organization is nothing but just like a human body, which has several parts. Now for proper functioning of a human body, it is required that all the body parts work in collaboration with each other. The entire functioning of the parts is controlled through brain, which is the store of knowledge. Now, for an organization, the knowledge is both central and distributed. The old employees, who have been working with the organization, possess a vivid range of memories encompassing several experiences regarding several situations being encountered, while working. Sharing of those experiences to the comparatively new employees can always enrich the level of knowledge of the latter about the functional processes of the organization.
- Like a human body, organizations also have memories. These memories are divided into tangible and intangible in nature. Tangible memories are nothing but several documented records of organization. The intangible memories are the ones, which stay in the minds of the employees in the form of several stories and myths, which helps in forming the background of organizational culture. This culture is built by sharing those old stories and myths among the employees.
- Knowledge being used and exploited in any organization is mainly divided into two categories, namely implicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Implicit knowledge is the one, which one can gather by means of any educational curriculum. Tacit knowledge is the one, which comes only with experience. The second one is more critical in the organizations, as it is the one, which has got the most practicability in order to handle critical situations. It may be possible that a particular division of any organization has a particular employee, who is expert in handling a specific kind of issue, which is being faced by some other division. If that employee trains the employees in the latter division, they can also be expert in handling that issue. This is possible via knowledge sharing only.
For knowing about more aspects of knowledge sharing in organizations, kindly browse through the pages of www.elearningblog.org.uk.