How do employers manage local knowledge for organizational advantage?

摘要

More and more today, I find employees seeking the knowledge they need to do their jobs from their peers. They may Locate a "best practice" in the company database, or ask a question of an on-line network. New knowledge may result from a conversationwith a coLLeague who is just down the haiL, or from a phone caLL made to a contact who is halfway around the world. Organizations are encouraging this kind of knowledge sharing, even insisting upon it. KnowLedge exchanges like these reveal a new appreciation for the knowledge that employees gain simply by doing their work, or what I call "Local knowledge." Today's employers increasingly regard this Local know[edge as a vaLuabLe asset, and are trying to figure out ways to manage it for organizational advantage. I have studied how employees share the local knowledge they develop, and documented the many ways this happens in my book, Common Knowledge. What also interests me, however, is how employees determine if this borrowed local knowledge is valid, i.e., how they make the decision to apply what someone else learned from experience to their own situations. It is an important issue, in my view, because we are now in the middle of a change in how we think about the validity of knowledge within our organizations.