Know

Overview

We often hear organisations saying that their people are their greatest asset.

 

What they are really saying is that the knowledge their people have and the way they apply it to work tasks is their greatest asset.

 

However most organisations don’t think of it this way and organisational knowledge walks out the door with every person who leaves. Work flows are often interrupted if the person with the knowledge is sick or on holiday and tasks get delayed or forgotten.

 

Now, consider the internet. It houses vast amounts of knowledge for nearly every topic you can turn your mind towards. Organisations spend thousands of dollars to provide instructional content on how to use their products on their websites.

 

However, when you go internally to an organisation it can be almost impossible to find any knowledge about how to complete even the simplest of tasks.

 

So how are we actually enabling our greatest assets to gain the knowledge needed to be our greatest assets!

Tacit or explicit knowledge

To understand how to manage knowledge we first need to understand what is meant by knowledge.

 

The Oxford dictionary defines knowledge as, “Facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject”.

 

Now this definition is actually a combination of two types of knowledge, skills which is knowledge in people’s heads (tacit knowledge) and facts or information which could be in peoples head (tacit knowledge) or written down (explicit knowledge).

 

I think that this is an important distinction when applying this to an organisational setting.

 

To consider knowledge fully you need to think about how you can support people to build tacit knowledge when they join an organisation and when changes are made to that organisation.

 

This is where explicit knowledge can be very supportive. Well written knowledge articles or well made videos can help people to learn what they need to know about organisations.

 

The creation of explicit knowledge in your organisation also starts with tacit knowledge in people's heads and their ability to communicate these things simply.

Knowledge management

There are four knowledge conversion processes between tacit and explicit knowledge: socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation.

 

Now these processes are four large words that are used theoretically but I explain them as:

• Learning from people (socialisation)
• Recording your knowledge (externalisation)
• Creating new knowledge from existing sources (combination)
• Learning from recorded knowledge (internalisation)

 

Effective knowledge management is understanding how the knowledge conversion processes are working in your organisation and using that to your advantage.