Monday, January 6, 2014

About mildew and KM: Shared knowledge should not always be multiplied

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As I used to state sometimes: knowledge is the only thing that grows when you share it.
(until one of my course members remarked (thank you Marc DB) this is also the case for bacteria, mildew and virusses I had to change this into: knowledge is the only good thing that grows when you share it).

But is this always the case?
There is one danger I see: bad quality of knowledge may be infecteous.

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
A real life example.
A company where IT is built by a person who followed the evolutions from IT from let's say the 1995's. And because of that he's still responsible for the IT infrastructure. Because in the eyes of the management he did a great job, they are really trusting him - not aware of the evolutions today. 
And the IT responsible just did his job - but not evolving anymore. 
So when I met this company the infrastructure and rules for workers to connect to the intranet etc were in one word archaic.

A question to be asked: what if the IT responsible would not share his knowledge with the management. Knowing that company a little bit, they would hire a consultant for a few days to be advised. And the chance of a better IT solutions would have been a lot higher.

The IT responsible shared his knowledge - but there was totally no quality control.
Now you can start point fingers and say this is a special case, and that the IT responsible didn't do a good job, etc....

It's just one example - and there are others. E.g. in a team of SW developers where the input of the very assertive engineers are taken into account, and the better input of very introvert developers is neglected - if they dared to share their input.

I flagged this in this company, but it was not my assignment, so I don't know they did anything about it.

One should absolutely strive to a culture of knowledge sharing.  In a conscious way. Having one eye on quality and the other on quanitty.

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