Developing strategies for overcoming barriers to knowledge sharing based on conversational knowledge management: A case study of a financial company

Abstract

Knowledge management involves the systematic management of vital knowledge resources and the associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, utilizing and exploiting information. A key challenge emerging for organizations is how to encourage knowledge sharing within an organization because knowledge is an organization's intellectual capital and is of increasing importance in gaining a competitive business advantage. Isolated initiatives for promoting knowledge sharing and team collaboration without taking into consideration the limitations and constraints of knowledge sharing can halt any further development in the KM culture of an operation. This article investigates knowledge sharing bottlenecks and proposes the use of conversational knowledge sharing as an effective instrument for knowledge sharing. And to develop strategies, this paper determines the causes and effects of knowledge barriers and proposes solutions by using HOQ. The article introduces a financial company case study as a best practice example of conversational knowledge sharing. Then, the paper analyzes the case study to provide evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.