(FORTUNE Magazine) – A few years ago Jack Whalen, a sociologist now at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, spent some time in a customer-service call center outside Dallas studying how people worked with expert-systems software. The software (in this case, Inference Corp.'s CasePoint) was supposed to help employees tell customers how to fix copier problems--paper jams, etc.--by matching descriptions of a problem against a knowledge base of known solutions. Trouble was, employees weren't using it.

Management decided workers needed an incentive to change. Confident that CasePoint was the most productive system, the company held a contest: Workers would win points (convertible into cash) each time they solved a customer problem, by whatever means. The winner by a country mile was an eight-year veteran named Carlos, who had more than 900 points. Carlos made managers uncomfortable--"He's a cowboy," said one--but they weren't surprised. Carlos really knew his stuff, and everybody, including Carlos, knew it. He almost never used the software.

The runner-up, however, was a shock. Trish had been with the company just four months, had no previous experience with copiers, and didn't even have the new software on her machine. Yet her 600 points doubled the score of the third-place finisher. Her secret: She sat right across from Carlos. She overheard him when he talked; she persuaded him to show her the innards of copiers during lunch breaks; she asked other colleagues for their tips too.

Trish's score says a lot about how knowledge gets shared. The point isn't to diss the software. CasePoint has many fans and documented triumphs. Every geek knows not to evangelize, even to geeks, without humbly adding, "Technology is just an enabler"--but it's one hell of an enabler. From Guttenberg to HTML, technology has done more to spread knowledge than all organizational development consultants put together. Sure, Trish learned better from Carlos than anyone did from CasePoint, but how many people can sit next to him?

The point is this: There is no single best practice for sharing knowledge. It's not a matter of choosing classroom vs. hands-on, technical vs. social, the software behind a monitor vs. the wetware behind a forehead. Each needs the other.

To see the interdependencies, consider the case of PricewaterhouseCoopers. If I hear one more consultant say, "Knowledge is the only thing we have to sell," I will take up narcolepsy in self-defense. But it's true: A firm like PwC (with 160,000 partners and employees in 150 countries) has no reason for being if it cannot bring its collective brainpower to bear on clients' problems. When it was formed in 1998 from the merger of PriceWaterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand, it became one firm by getting its knowledge shared across what had been boundaries.

Ellen "Lin" Knapp, PwC's chief knowledge officer, supported that effort with an elegant, powerful intranet. On KnowledgeCurve, employees find repositories of best practices, consulting methodologies, tax and audit rules, news services, online training, directories of experts, and more, plus links to an extended family of specialized sites for various industries or skills. By now all professional firms of any size have something like it: a library and yellow pages, on steroids and online.

The site gets 18 million hits a month, mostly from workers downloading human resources forms or checking news, but also from employees looking things up. Yet there's a feeling that it's underutilized. Says George Bailey, the firm's North American leader for innovation: "Everybody goes there sometimes, but when they're looking for expertise, most people go down the hall."

Quite independently, a British-based PwC consultant, Jon Z. Bentley, and a few colleagues--a group of "self-selected creatives," Bentley says--took it upon themselves some five years ago to create a network where they could "collaborate so as to be more innovative." Their network is just a Lotus Notes e-mail list. It has no rules, no moderator, no agenda except what's set by the messages people send. Any employee can join. The list became known as the "Kraken" after someone joked that creativity in PwC was like the mythological sea monster who, in a poem by Tennyson, lies "far, far beneath in the abysmal sea" and sleeps "his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep."

Today about 500 people are members of the Kraken, and though it's unofficial and slightly renegade, Bailey says it's the firm's premier forum for sharing. Technologically the Kraken is to KnowledgeCurve as Carlos is to CasePoint. It's difficult to search the archives. On a busy day members might get 50 Kraken messages: a recipe for infoglut, one might think. But it works--and works so well that more Kraken-like creatures are spawning in PwC.

Bentley offers a number of reasons for its success. First, it's demand-driven: 80% of Kraken traffic starts with a question--Does anybody know? Has anybody ever done? Often--surprise--a question provokes a four- or five-page response, with real research having been done for no reward other than the satisfaction of having helped. Also, the Kraken gets at tacit knowledge, provoking responses from people who didn't know they had something to contribute. It tolerates fuzzy questions better than do formal databases, where one often needs a bit of expertise even to begin. The Kraken's right there with the morning mail and coffee--you don't have to make a decision to visit. Last, it's full of opinion, held strongly, right or wrong. There's a saying at Xerox PARC: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." In all those ways, the Kraken differs from KnowledgeCurve. The latter supplies explicit knowledge, on a site you have to go to. It preserves knowledge more than creates it. It's a compendium, not a conversation.

There's an ancient (as these things go) debate over whether knowledge management happens by design or by emergence. Says Knapp, correctly: "I find myself coming down dead center in the middle of the argument." The Kraken is about learning, KnowledgeCurve about teaching. You can't have one without the other.

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