Harold Jarche has been writing good stuff on (personal) knowledge management for quite a while on his blog. But what if he were working in a company that required him to share things in the formal knowledge management system? This is what he calls the Knowledge sharing paradox revisited...
The knowledge sharing paradox is that enterprise social tools can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. People will freely share their knowledge if they remain in control of it because knowledge is a very personal thing. Knowledge workers care about what they need to get work done, but do they care about the organizational knowledge base?
It's a funny thing, this paradox. On the one side, the organization really wants to "know what its people know". But on the other side, individuals don't share their knowledge by typing (or talking) into a database. We share knowledge as a side effect of interacting with one another around shared interests, shared concerns, shared experiences...
We don't share with a database. We share with people.