Using blogs to manage tacit knowledge in enterprises?
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 Tags: [tacit] [knowledge] [management] [gtd] [blogs] [blogging]
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