Two issues in Knowledge Sharing

In this week's presentations - Siemens and Care Group, we got to learn about two types of knowledge sharing

1. Knowledge sharing in a crowd level Vs. Knowledge sharing in an individual level - Siemens case
2. Knowledge sharing in a control environment Vs. knowledge sharing in a free environment - Care Group case

Siemens had its knowledge sharing through Share net. But the question is - can we really trust the information/knowledge that we can find there? As it is said that the crowd source knowledge may not be better than an individual-source knowledge especially when that individual is an expert in the particular field. However, in some cases, crowd-source knowledge could be better. In the class, Dr. Schwarz gave a really nice example of a t-shirt manufacturing company, which took inputs in designing from the real customers and produced the most liked designs.

Another issue - knowledge sharing in a control environment is better or knowledge sharing in a free environment? As we learned from the Care Group case study, that there was only one person who knew everything about the system and in his absence, the whole network was shut down because there was no one else who knew how to work with the system. Now, why did it happen? Here comes the issue with knowledge sharing - was KS not effective? Or was it not done in the proper manner? Would something like this would have happened if KS would was more in a free environment?

But whatever said, I do as well think more conservatively and agree with what Dr. Schwarz  said in the class - "I don't really believe in KM or KS". The simple reason being, can we trust the organization? Can we be so flexible about it that we dump our knowledge in the system and be of no value at all? Well, there could be many questions to be answered before i could actually take up KS.