Implementing Knowledge Management Processes
infoman 04 Aug 2007 08:51
knowledge management is:
Managing
- what is known
- How well it is known
- Who knows it
- How it is applied
- How it can be leveraged and used
Organizational Knowledge: Explicit
- Recorded, consisting of written text, reports, documents, databases, and websites.
- Codified and can be classified through a database, website listing or other means of access.
- Rule-based or object-based.
- Using symbols, explicit knowledge can be easily communicated between groups or individuals.
Examples: sales database for a company, the procedures manual, or the induction manual.
Organizational Knowledge: Tacit
- Resides in individual’s memories.
- Built from personal experience and know-how from experience.
- Also values, ideas, bias, preconceptions, assumptions, believes, habits, etc.
- Expressed through action-based skills.
- If captured, the knowledge is no longer tacit.
The sales person may have the factual sales/order information about a customer (that is the explicit knowledge), but may also know that a particular customer needs to be treated as 'special' because of the customer's personality traits (that is tacit knowledge).
Organizational Knowledge
- Three types of organizational knowledge are interdependent and work together.
- The more integrated the three types of knowledge are, the more unique the organizational knowledge will be, and the more effective the results.
Sharing Knowledge
- Necessary for the organization to develop and benefit from its knowledge base.
- Explicit knowledge is recorded and obvious to the user, yet the process (policies, infrastructure, procedures, etc) to access this type of knowledge must still be managed.
- Tacit knowledge is difficult to capture, and if captured, some is lost in the transfer. Tacit becomes explicit.