If nothing else, a knowledge-sharing system provides a means for employees at the leaf nodes of a hierarchy to converse amongst themselves. Consider the organization depicted in figure 15.1. Suppose that a worker in Singapore has a question that could be answered by a worker in Des Moines. The act of finding the coworker and getting assistance requires going all the way up the hierarchy to the chief executive in London and then back down a different path through the hierarchy to Des Moines. This bottleneck could be eliminated by eliminating the hierarchy. However, most organizations don't want to eliminate their hierarchies. It is the hierarchy that enables the corporation to reduce management complexity by establishing profit-and-loss responsibility at intermediate levels. Better to supplement the hierarchy with an informal mechanism by which the Singapore-based worker can ask for help and the Des Moines-based worker can offer it, i.e., a knowledge-sharing system.
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