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Muhammad Adeel Zaffar

Demystifying Tacit Knowledge. Muhammad Adeel Zaffar. Overview. What is a Knowledge Management System? What is Knowledge? What is Tacit/Implicit Knowledge? How Important is Tacit Knowledge to a KMS? Operationalizing Tacit Knowledge Tacit Knowledge and Organizational Performance

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Muhammad Adeel Zaffar

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  1. Demystifying Tacit Knowledge Muhammad Adeel Zaffar

  2. Overview • What is a Knowledge Management System? • What is Knowledge? • What is Tacit/Implicit Knowledge? • How Important is Tacit Knowledge to a KMS? • Operationalizing Tacit Knowledge • Tacit Knowledge and Organizational Performance • Transferring Tacit Knowledge • Concluding Remarks

  3. What is a Knowledge Management System? • What is it?* • An effort to increase useful knowledge in the organization • Systematic process for acquiring, creating, integrating, sharing, using and collaborating on information, insights, and experiences to achieve organizational goals • What’s the goal? • . . . to improve the process of creating, storing, retrieving, transferring, and applying knowledge (Keane and Mason, 2006)

  4. What is Knowledge? • The KM literature discusses • Explicit and Tacit knowledge • Other classifications?* • What is explicit and what is tacit? • knowledge that we can express and knowledge that is outside of such capabilities (Styhre, 2004) • Knowing what, how, why, who (Swart and Powell, 2006)

  5. What is Tacit/Implicit Knowledge? • The idea was first formally introduced by Polanyi in 1958 (Styhre, 2004) • That which escapes representations and measurement but still matters • Other descriptions (Ambrosini and Bowman, 2001) • Difficult to formalize • Practical • Personal knowledge • Context specific • Four categories of tacit knowledge (Lubit, 2001) • Hard to pin down skills (know-how) • Mental models • Ways of approaching problems • Organizational routines

  6. What is Tacit/Implicit Knowledge? • Problem of demarcation • Both ‘types’ are intertwined • So is Tacit the ‘residual’ or what ‘remains’ outside of articulation? • Martz and Shepherd’s (2003) definition: “The amount of implicit learning in an experience is the change the experience produces in an individual’s ability to relate explicit knowledge about a topic”

  7. What is Tacit/Implicit Knowledge? • Is it a ‘type’ or a ‘dimension’? (Keane and Mason, 2006) • Do we need to ‘convert’ it into explicit knowledge?

  8. How important is Tacit Knowledge to a KMS? • Related to people and context therefore can be lost in case of employee turnover • Executive support system is more valued if it is just not purely analytical (Bradley et al, 2006)

  9. Operationalizing Tacit Knowledge • It is elusive (Stenmark, 2000) • Sometimes we ourselves are not fully aware of it • There are no incentives to make this knowledge ‘explicit’ at an individual level • There is a potential risk of losing power by making it explicit

  10. Operationalizing Tacit Knowledge • Surveys and Structured Interviews? • Cognitive maps • Representation of an individual’s personal knowledge and experience • One such map is a ‘causal map’ • Handouts

  11. Operationalizing Tacit Knowledge • Elements of expert knowledge • Cognitive (individual’s viewpoints, beliefs) • Technical (context specific skills and abilities) • Traditionally, KMS have focused on capturing the cognitive processing of an expert to generate ‘rules’ for a computer

  12. Operationalizing Tacit Knowledge • The traditional approaches have tried to convert all forms of knowledge into explicit knowledge before representing how the knowledge typology functions as a system • Knowledge is lost in the codification process • Who should be involved in codifying knowledge? • Who plays the more dominant role in this process of codification? • Need to be aware of the context of the knowledge • Example: Knowledge Maps do not capture . . .

  13. Tacit Knowledge and Organizational Performance • How is it linked to gaining sustained competitive advantage? • Transient competitive advantage (Lubit, 2001)

  14. Transferring Tacit Knowledge • Issues (Desouza, 2003) • Lack of commitment of top management to sharing organizational knowledge and absence of role models who are at the forefront of such knowledge sharing endeavors • Lack of communication of vision and scope of a knowledge-sharing activity

  15. Transferring Tacit Knowledge • Recommendations (Lubit, 2001; Desouza, 2003) • Coaching arrangements with experts and coaches • Teach managers how to coach • Include this in their performance measures • Hold structured group discussions • Networking and work groups • Brainstorming • Teamwork • Documenting ‘learning histories’ • Written narratives of critical events in a company e.g. some innovation, product launch etc. • Making tacit knowledge more explicit??? • Let nature take its course

  16. Concluding Remarks • There appears to be a general consensus that tacit knowledge is not something which you can acquire through mere exposure to explicit knowledge • If it is indeed important for competitive advantage, do you really want to make it that explicit? • How can your organization take advantage of it if it only resides within a few people? • Is having a cutting-edge IT solution for your knowledge management needs a sufficient condition for successful knowledge management? • Have informal and emergent structures to facilitate exchange

  17. Future Research • My current understanding of the topic is limited however, I believe that the following question needs to addressed and put to rest • Is it necessary to have a formal set of rules to codify tacit knowledge?

  18. Questions/Comments?

  19. References Ambrosini, V. and Bowman, C. (2001) Tacit knowledge: Some suggestions for operationalizations, Journal of Management Studies, 38(6), 811-829 Bradley, J. H., Paul, R. and Seeman, E. (2006) Analyzing the structure of expert knowledge, Information and Management, 43, 77-91 Desouza, K. C. (2003) Facilitating Tacit Knowledge Exchange, Communications of the ACM, 46(6), 55-88 Keane, B. T. and Mason, R. M. (2006) On the Nature of Knowledge: Rethinking Popular Assumptions, Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences Lubit, R. (2001) Tacit Knowledge and Knowledge Management: The Keys to Sustainable Competitive Advantage, Organizational Dynamics, 29(4), 164-178 Martz, W. B. and Shepherd, M. M. (2003) Testing for the Transfer of Tact Knowledge: Making case for Implicit learning, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 1(1), 41-56 Stenmark, D. (2000) Leveraging Tacit Organizational Knowledge, Journal of Management Information Systems, 17(3), 9-24 Styhre, A. (2004) Rethinking Knowledge: A Bergsonian Critique of the Notion of Tacit Knowledge, British Journal of Management, 15, 177-188 Swart, J. and Powell, P. H. (2006) Men and measures: capturing knowledge requirements in firms through qualitative system modelling, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 57, 10-21 * Class Notes, Dr. Stylianou’s slides on Fundamentals of Knowledge Management

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