In our weekly '15 minutes of sharing knowledge' at Tam Tam, my colleague Stef did a small presentation on a book he is reading called Working Knowledge. In this book, knowledge management is described like a market where people are selling knowledge to customers that consume knowledge. There are traders that enable the transaction between those two. Kind of interesting point of view.
There are also some examples that describe how and where this transaction of knowledge is done. And, this is not a real surprise, it turns out that most of the sharing is done at the watercoolers, coffemachines and company's cafeteria. Places where people meet and talk.
So, SharePoint Portal is basically just a tool to provide a environment to manage and share knowledge. The interesting question in this presentation was: Should we, as a technical partner for implementing solutions such as Sharepoint, advise to our customers to create fysical meeting point where knowledge workers can meet and talk, which has nothing to do with Sharepoint, but which has everything to do with sharing knowledge?
Should we start selling watercoolers as well? My personal opinion is that it IS part of knowledge management and therefore we should be able to use it. What are your thoughts? Are there other examples as well that you have experienced in knowledge management situations? I would like to hear them!