There are 2 types of knowledge in enterprises: explicit and tacit. The explicit knowledge is easily explained, documented and verbalized. This type of knowledge is easily handled by today knowledge management systems.
However, what is a tacit knowledge? This type of knowledge is much more subtle and hard to define, grab and communicate. We can call it the savoir-faire, the know-how, of employees. Normally, the organizations do not know the presence of, or take care of, this knowledge before that a worker possessing a lot of tacit knowledge stops working for them.
The goal of an organization will be to try to identify, to collect, to classify, to verbalize and to diffuse all the tacit knowledge present in the enterprise.
These personal experiences, that create the tacit knowledge, are hard to grab. How could we try to diffuse them, and crystallize them into the organization, if we have difficulties to define them?
The problematic of enterprises is to:
- Find the knowledge
- Preserve it
- Valorize it
- Actualize it
- Manage it
The real problem is not to perform these tasks on explicit knowledge, but on the tacit knowledge. How could we find, preserve, valorize, actualize and manage the personal experiences of our workers? How to handle this precise experience, that savoir-faire, which makes the tacit knowledge so critical for our enterprise?
A possible answer: Blogs
I will take a small development team of 5 or 10 people to do my demonstration.
A way to try to crystallize the tacit knowledge is to diffuse it into the enterprise. The problem is that tacit knowledge is not really the knowledge that you will find on the knowledge base of the MSDN library. The tacit knowledge, as we described it, is composing of personal experiences. However, personal experiences could be anything: past working experiences, scholar experiences, personal experiences, etc.
Then, how could we take on this type knowledge? Is there a way?
I think so. A solution would be to implement a blogging philosophy into the working group. Take into account that there are 2 or 3 old school developers into the development team with 7 or 8 fresh graduated university students. The 2 or 3 old schools developers have experience, savoir-faire, and this is that knowledge we need to transmit to the 7 or 8 others.
The best way to transmit the tacit knowledge is probably by informal interactions. It is exactly what is behind the blogging philosophy: a formal interaction between a blogger and his readers. So, think about it. You would give 2 or 3 paid hours to your employees to blog into the internal blog system of the enterprise. You tell them: wrote what you want. Wrote about your past experiences, wrote about your family, wrote about the way you resolve problems, wrote about anything.
These informal communications will give critical information to the enterprise. First of all, the old school developers will diffuse their tacit knowledge to the fresh university graduated students; our first goal is then reached, or at worse partially solved. In addition, the managers will know how their employees think and are. It will help them to manage them more effectively and find if something goes wrong with one of them or a whole working team. Depending on the blogging system they will use, they will be able to find knowledge, preserve it, valorize it, actualize it and manage it.
It is how I think that blogs could help enterprises to grab and diffuse their tacit knowledge: by implementing the blogging philosophy into their enterprise, into their working teams.
Technorati: [tacit] [knowledge] [management] [gtd] [blogs] [blogging]
Fortrel
June 7, 2005 — 8:38 pm
I’m not 100% sure a blog is the best way to manage this kind of information. First, you would have to convince people to write blog entries. It is definitivly not appealing to everybody. Then, you have to convince the same group of people to read each other blogs. Again, people might not be all that interested in doing that. It’s time-consuming. Combine that with the fact that it’s not everybody who has good writing skills, and the blog solution is probably not the best best of all. What we’ve been using at the company where I work is a corporate Wiki. We’ve used it to create FAQ, HowTo and procedure documents. It’s a really usefull tool but even then, it’s only a minority among us who actively uses this tool. Forcing tools and methodologies into people is hard, if not impossible. Anyway, that was my 0.02$ CDN. Alex
Fred
June 7, 2005 — 8:39 pm
Hello Alex,
You are right and your points are good. I should have emphasis on the point that this is for informal discussions, and not obligatory. You are right: not everyone would like to write something on a blog. However, I think that if you put the system in place and tell them that 2 hours of their paid time could be use to blog if they wish to, I think that when people will know what they can do with this “blogging” thing, they will try it. It’s sure that the average writing skills in not really well, particularly in computer sciences. But, is this not a good thing? I mean, if they have the possibility to practice their writing skills, the whole department’s documentation will also improve. Personally I am in advocate of good documentation for software development. The only way that developers write readable and useful documentation is by practice. But you are right: if you force them to write on it… it will be a flop.
It is sure that a Wiki system is always good too 🙂
Merci beaucoup pour ton commentaire Alex, j’espère que nous nous reparlerons d’ici peu!
C’est la première fois qu’un québécois écris sur mon blog je crois, merci 🙂
Salutations,
Fred
Fortrel
June 7, 2005 — 8:39 pm
If a company manages to get some incentives for blogging and actually gets its employees to do it then I agree, a corporate blog would be a wonderfull thing. Right now I’m kinda doing that anyway by regularly writing on our Wiki. Since I’m organising information and writing up FAQ, etc. about work, I don’t wait for my manager’s blessings. I consider this part of my day-to-day job. — Hey! Je ne savais pas que tu parlais français. Je vais continuer d’aller faire ma visite quotidienne sur ton site tant que tu y posteras des messages. Félicitation pour ton blog, c’est très intéressant. Alex
Fred
June 7, 2005 — 8:40 pm
Hello,
>I don’t wait for my manager’s blessings
I hope! And if he does not agree that you spend time doing it then I do not think that he will be in business for long 😉
I think that today managers will need to find the importance of writings in their enterprises. It will be important to write documentation, to manage projects, for the marketing, etc. I am discovering the power of words and good writing while reader other people blogs. I think that enterprises, specially them in IT, could also benefit by discovering it, specially with the integration of Internet in the everyday tasks of enterprises. And a way to discover this power is by practicing it (in our case with corporate-blogs).
Merci 🙂
Salutations,
Fred
jim wilde
June 13, 2005 — 8:40 pm
Hi, Good discussion! We’ve developed a tool – Ideascape – initially for interal use to management ideas, tacit knowledge, the blogsospher, etc, but have started offering it to businesses. It works as a personal km tool (blogs, wikis, rss, tags, groupt) but is tied into a common repository for sharing and security purposes. The system also has hooks into third party services, delicious, technorati, et al that gives the user the opportunity to expand on their ideas by using independent, diverse sources of information. What’s more, writing does not seem to be that much of an issue since everybody knows how to cut and paste and string related information together so it makes sense. Anyway,thank you. Warm regards, Jim Wilde
Fred
June 13, 2005 — 8:42 pm
Hello Mr. Wilde,
Thank for your participation to the discussion 🙂
Ideascape seem a really interesting system. I think it is the type of systems that business will need to incorporate such principles into their businesses.
“What’s more, writing does not seem to be that much of an issue since everybody knows how to cut and paste and string related information together so it makes sense”
— Yeah, but the idea is to create ideas and explicit the tacit knowledge by writing our experiences and savoir-faire. So, workers will need to get into the creative writing. It is one of the problems: not everybody likes to write. More than this… I think that people learned to fear writing at school. (William Zinsser talked about it in his book Writing to Learn). So companies need to take this thing into account to insist these employees to start to write into these systems. It’s like anything; we need to learn how to do it to get rid of our fear to finally enjoy the process.
Salutations,
Fred