Knowledge Hiding reasons

In a recent blog entry Fighting the Knowledge Hiding Epidemic V Mary Abraham mentions a number of reasons why KM failed and why people still don't share. I do not find the findings really surprising. And if you are struck by lightning with those facts, maybe your focus on Knowledge Management has been wrong so far. The fact that it is humans that share knowledge and that you have to look into the human factors should have been in your thoughts for some time.
$73 Billion - if the organizations would have spend half of the budget they had for their "KM project" on driving the human element forward instead of buying "KM software", if they had invested in proper KM drivership, strategic leadership and support roles, I am sure the outcome would have been a lot better.

But often after the budget is gone, the project leader is off to the next "project", no wonder it fails, if nobody is dealing with human elements, and corporate culture stays what it has always been.

In the list of reasons that are stated from Ian Thorpe, I want to pick on a couple of those. I hope people understand them correctly and read Ian's argument, which I do support.

It might sound like bad quality is the reason it is not shared (and there is those people that argue, that only the highest quality "knowledge" should make it into the flow). I disagree, and that is actually what Ian is after in this statement. Yes, you want highest quality where you can, but who is to judge quality in the first place. In programming a raw two-line piece of code can be more valuable than a finished 10000-line one, it depends on what you need at the moment. Also limiting to "presumed perfect" limits innovation. The much better approach is allowing "less-than-perfect" with a note indicating limitations. I have had those people tell me - I cannot share that, I need two more weeks", and I reply. Why don't you share it now, and write down what you would do if you had two more weeks. A lot of times people might run with what is there and get real benefit from it, and then one of them will do what the original author did not have time for. When it comes to knowledge sharing plug-n-play is not the only answer.

So, yes those are reasons, why people do not share, but I bey you to discourage that thinking to reap wider benefits from knowledge assets that might seem just raw to one person, but contain the enlightning idea to others that tehy were longing for.