Incentives for sharing won't necessarily overcome the tendency to hoard methods and techniques and a dull person armed with the latest in search technologies will never outperform a bright, curious person who is equipped with far inferior tools. The Central Issue Codifying, capturing and communicating knowledge is only part of the problem knowledge management must solve, and perhaps the lesser of two parts. It is the ability to deploy knowledge in the service of the company that matters most. The ability to do so constitutes a strategic competitive advantage for any company that can master it. Given that the ability to deploy knowledge is the central issue and that, in the final analysis, this deployment must occur through people, some commonplace organizational practices have the potential to play a key role in knowledge management.
Training is a way of disseminating and diffusing know-how.
So are rotational assignments. Encouraging experimentation is also a means of fostering the creation of new knowledge and innovation. The list of possibilities goes on and on. The point to be made is that the domain of knowledge management can be as broad or as narrow as a company wishes to make it. He is also a senior consultant with The Distance Consulting Company .