1. Muhammad Adeel Zaffar Demystifying Tacit Knowledge

2. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 13 Tacit Knowledge and Organizational Performance How is it linked to gaining sustained competitive advantage? –Transient competitive advantage (Lubit, 2001)

14. 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. 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. 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. 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. 18 Questions/Comments?

19. 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 39 th 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