I recently had an email exchange with someone asking if knowledge sharing is possible where I work. Their position was that the culture doesn't support it, so it has little chance of happening at an organizational level. I agree, of course, that culture plays an enormous part in knowledge sharing. If you look at a large company from the top-down, and there is a legacy of bureaucracy, political control over information may be a big barrier to the development of a knowledge culture. In an environment like this, it's not surprising that people might tend to hoard rather than share. Having experienced multiple waves of layoffs, many people may view KM efforts as the knowledge extraction process that occurs before the knowledge pods are excised from the main vessel. But the view from the ground up, where knowledge work happens -- the kind of work that is closest to the company's product -- is that the need to create and share knowledge exists despite the politicized environment and bureaucratic culture. So how does it have a chance of evolving and surviving in this hostile environment?

From my perspective as a librarian, knowledge management has traditionally had to do with the process of information provision (knowledge representation for information retrieval) and supporting the process that evolves from information gathering and synthesis into knowledge creation on a personal (single customer) or group level. What I've recently observed and have been a part of, is the grass roots effort to manage personal knowledge. The need for people to acquire and control knowledge within their small communities persists and some people have felt the need to use an array of tools including weblogs, wikis or discussion groups rather than centralized CMS or KM systems. What's different with weblogs, wikis, discussion groups, IM, etc. where people connect on a personal level is that they do so without having to route themselves through a process or system that was created by upper management without looking into what people actually need or how they work. They do so because they need to and because without the interference of a CIO or management-chosen system, they can control the knowledge creation and flow. The difference in tools such as self-installed weblogs/wikis is that because they're closely held and controlled, they may have a better chance of being used and sustained by the people who need them. They may also die when they're no longer needed. This should be natural, if you take the view of the company as an information ecology. With this grass-roots scenario, the need, use and evoution is organic. The output is produced of and by the people having the needs.

So, given that this kind of knowledge management effort still has the audacity to arise in a hostile environment, does this mean that knowledge management has a chance in a place where the culture doesn't seem to get it from the top? I would say yes, if you believe that acting locally has an impact globally. Change from the grass roots might be more effective and have a better chance of sustainability. Of course, it would help to have key influential motivators that can make the new KM meme viral within the organization -- to lead by example. Knowledge management is most effective on a person to person level, where people share knowledge directly, making the tacit explicit in conversation. These tools reflect that type of inter-personal communication and are possibly better suited for KM because of that. It is this view that keeps me interested in designing information systems that support knowledge creation in the company.