Towards Assessing the Willingness of Intelligence Analysts to Contribute to Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) in Highly Classified Environments

Since September 11, 2001, the United States Government (USG) has possessed unparalleled capability in terms of dedicated Intelligence and information collection assets supporting the analysts of the Intelligence Community (IC). The USG IC has sponsored, developed, and borne witness to extraordinary advances in technology, techniques, and procedures focused on knowledge harvesting, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Knowledge, within successful (effective & productive) organizations, exists as a commodity; a commodity that can be created, captured, imparted, shared, and leveraged. This poster will provide an overview of on-going research that addresses the challenge of maintaining strong organizational effectiveness and productivity through the use of Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). The main goal of this proposed study is to empirically assess a model to test the impact of the factors of reward, power, centrality, trust, collaborative environment, resistance to share, ease-of-using KMS, organizational structure, and top management support to inducement, willingness to share, as well as opportunity to contribute knowledge to a KMS on knowledge-sharing in highly classified environments.