“It’s not about creating an encyclopedia that captures everything that anybody ever knew. Rather, it’s about keeping track of those who know the recipe, and nurturing the culture and the technology that will get them talking”.
This places the higher value on the knowledge in people’s heads and finding ways to increase its mobility.
Larry Prisak speaks of a continuum of knowledge: from “capture” to “connectivity”:
A focus on capture drives a set of activities relating to codification and procedures for knowledge.
Es: information packs, briefing notes, websites, knowledge bases, … all with tremendous efficiency
An alternative approach is to invest time in the processes and technologies that stimulate connections between people
Es: communities, networks, collaboration tools, … these address the transfer of tacit knowledge.
The selection of a point on the spectrum should be a reflection of the culture in an organization at a point in time.
Knowledge can be held in people’s heads (tacit) or it can be written down (explicit).
It’s not possible to capture the full richness of what’s in people’s heads. On the other hand, explicit knowledge can be stored and searched. Then, questioning can bring out the tacit knowledge.
There will be two routes for seeking out knowledge:
The weakness of the second approach has been that once captured, knowledge grows stale, unless there is some mechanism for refreshing it. To be useful it needs to be refreshed frequently and it takes the organic nature of a network to own and refresh it with new experiences.
It can straddle the fields of learning and organizational development, human resources and IT. This is often represented as three circles. KM is the area when the three circles overlap.
There is a large marketplace for KM products and techniques, but the greatest value is generated when these pieces come together in a complementary way. If you know the picture that you are trying to create, it is easier to spot the gaps.