Acquiring and Sharing Expert Knowledge

Research states that knowledge-intensive companies must realize the importance of technologies and tools to acquire, access and reuse knowledge within the organization. Allocating enough time and resources to knowledge management is an important element of staying competitive. In this report I try to find out how different professions handle the concepts of knowledge management with focus on the expert knowledge they depend on to stay competitive. I have interviewed people from three different professions; software engineering, law and medicine to find out about experiences and opinions about different methods and techniques to acquire and share expert knowledge. The similarity between the three chosen professions is the constant need to stay up-to-date on relevant knowledge, and the fact that their work requires continuous learning. Are there differences in the preferred ways to handle learning? The difference between the three professions, other than knowledge the they possess, are the formal requirements to learning and updating knowledge. Both lawyers (counsellors) and doctors have formal requirements set by law to update their expertise. Software engineers do not have this requirement. Does this play a role in the ways to handle KM? I will discuss the importance of acquiring and sharing expert knowledge, what methods are used to achieve this, and how influencial factors such as formal requirements to learning influence this process. I will focus on the differences between the professions taking part in my study. Before presenting the results from the interviews, I present the current state-ofthe-art within the field of KM.