Examining shared knowledge at production time and use time

A distributed organization needs to have mechanisms for sharing knowledge that are essential for conducting jobs. Two issues exist in knowledge sharing: the production of knowledge, and the retrieval of knowledge. Although most research on knowledge sharing has dealt with the two issues separately, we argue that the two aspects are intertwined and are dependent of each other. We have examined the issues by taking a survey of system engineers using a Q and A database as a source of knowledge to be shared at NTT Data Corporation. Through examining the usefulness of the shared knowledge at production time and use time, we found that knowledge that was recognized as useful at production time was also recognized as useful at use time, even if the knowledge did not match what was requested by the user. The paper concludes with a discussion on what factors make knowledge useful for users.