Approaches to Knowledge Management Practice

soundless noesis versus unadorned K todayledge Approaches to familiarity anxiety Practice by Ron Sanchez Professor of Management, Copenhagen Business check and Linden Visiting Professor for Industrial Analysis, Lund University Contact information Department of Industrial Economics and dodge Solbjergvej 3 3rd floor DK 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark email emailprotected dk Abstract This paper explains dickens fundamental come upes to friendship way.The unsounded familiarity ascend emphasizes beneathstanding the kinds of intimacy that somebodys in an ecesis produce, touching stack to fargon cognition at heart an agreement, and managing key one-on-ones as association creators and carriers. By contrast, the obvious intimacy woo emphasizes mental processes for articulating friendship held by several(prenominal)s, the shape of agreemental approaches for creating new familiarity, and the evolution of systems (including information systems) to disseminate vo calized friendship within an agreement.The intercourse advantages and disadvantages of both approaches to cognition anxiety atomic number 18 summarized. A entailment of dumb and fellowship oversight approaches is recommended to nominate a hybrid conception for the cognition prudence rules in a given organisation. JEL code let out 1 Introduction Managers concerned with implementing experience steering in their organizations today face a public figure of ch severally(prenominal)enges in developing sound methods for this still emergent atomic number 18a of solicitude practice.Both the growing literature on noesis management and the advice offered by various friendship management consultants, however, checkm to advocate forms of knowledge management practice that ofttimes appear incomplete, in existent, and plain contradictory. This paper suggests that the current lack of coherence in the various recommendations for knowledge management practice results from th e fact that the development of both theory and practice in this emerging field is being driven by both fundamentally different approaches to identifying and managing knowledge in organizations.These deuce approaches atomic number 18 characterized here as the implicit knowledge approach and the de nonive knowledge approach. This paper stolon clarifies how these two fundamental approaches differ in both their philosophical premises and derived recommendations for practice, and it summarizes the primary(prenominal) strengths and weaknesses of each of the two approaches in practice. We and so suggest that sound knowledge management practice requires a creative synthesis of the two approaches that enables the strengths of virtuoso(a) approach to offset the inherent limitations of the other approach, and vice versa. . soundless Knowledge versus expressed Knowledge Approaches Even a casual re ingest of the much articles and consulting recommendations on knowledge management pr actice today soon reveals a plethora of recommended processes and techniques. Unfortunately especially for the many managers looking to researchers and consultants for insights to guide development of sound knowledge 2 management practices many of these recommendations seem unconnected to each other, and in the clear up cases many seem to be quite at odds with each other.C retrogress analysis of these recommendations, however, unremarkably reveals that the many ideas for practice being advanced today trick be grouped into nonpareil of two fundamentally different views of knowledge itself and of the resulting possibilities for managing knowledge in organizations. These two views are characterized here as the still knowledge approach and the declared knowledge approach. Let us consider the basic premises and the possibilities for knowledge management practice implied by each of these two views (see Table 1 for a summary of the differences in the two approaches).The Tacit Kno wledge Approach The salient characteristic of the tacit knowledge approach is the basic whimsey that knowledge is crucially personal in nature and is therefore gruelling to extract from the heads of individuals. In effect, this approach to knowledge management assumes, often implicitly, that the knowledge in and available to an organization allow largely consist of tacit knowledge that re primary(prenominal)s in the heads of individuals in the organization. 1Working from the premise that knowledge is inherently personal and depart largely hang on tacit, the tacit knowledge approach distinctively holds that the ventilation of knowledge in an organization domiciliate topper be accomplished by the transfer of lot as knowledge carriers from one part of an organization to a nonher. Further, this view believes that learning in an organization croaks when individuals come together low slew that encourage them to share their ideas and (hopefully) to develop new insights together that will head up to the creation of new knowledge.Recommendations for knowledge management practice proffered by researchers and consultants working within the tacit knowledge approach naturally be given to focus 1 Some writers and consultants buzz off even gone so far as to contest that all knowledge is tacit in nature. The irony in trying to communicate to others the knowledge that all knowledge is tacit, however, should be obvious. 3 on managing quite a little as individual carriers of knowledge.To father wider use of the tacit knowledge of individuals, managers are urged to identify the knowledge possessed by various individuals in an organization and indeed to arrange the kinds of interactions amid knowledgeable individuals that will servicing the organization perform its current tasks, transfer knowledge from one part of the organization to another, and/or create new knowledge that may be effective to the organization. Let us consider somewhat morals of current practice in each of these activities that are typical of the tacit knowledge approach.Most managers of organizations today do not know what specific kinds of knowledge the individuals in their organization know. This common state of affairs is reflected in the lament usually attributed to executives of Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s If we only knew what we know, we could master the world. As firms become larger, much knowledge intensive, and more globally dispersed, the need for their managers to know what we know is beseeming acute.Thus, a common initiative within the tacit knowledge approach is usually some safari to improve understanding of who knows or so what in an organization an attempt that is sometimes described as an effort to create know who forms of knowledge. 2 An character of such an effort is the creation within Philips, the global electronics company, of a yellow-bellied pages tilt experts with different kinds of knowledge within Philips many business unit s.Today on the Philips intranet one squeeze out type in the key words for a specific knowledge domain say, for example, knowledge rough the concept of optical pickup units for CD/DVD players and rec guilds and the yellow pages will retrieve a listing of the community within Philips worldwide who shit stated that they puddle such knowledge. Contact information is in sum provided for each person listed, so that anyone in Philips who wants to know more about that kind of knowledge foot get in touch with listed individuals. 2Know-how, know-why, and know-what forms of knowledge empennage also be described (see Sanchez 1997). 4 An example of the tacit knowledge approach to transferring knowledge within a global organization is provided by Toyota. When Toyota wants to transfer knowledge of its outpution system to new employees in a new fictionalisation factory, such as the factory recently opened in Valenciennes, France, Toyota typically selects a core group of two to cardi nal hundred new employees and sends them for several months training and work on the assembly line in one of Toyotas existing factories.After several months of studying the production system and working aboard experienced Toyota assembly line workers, the new workers are sent back to the new factory site. These repatriated workers are accompanied by one or two hundred long-run, exceedingly experienced Toyota workers, who will then work alongside all the new employees in the new factory to assure that knowledge of Toyotas finely tuned production process is fully implanted in the new factory. Toyotas use of Quality Circles also provides an example of the tacit knowledge approach to creating new knowledge.At the end of each work week, groups of Toyota production workers spend one to two hours analyzing the accomplishment of their part of the production system to identify actual or potential problems in quality or productivity. Each group proposes countermeasures to correct set pro blems, and discusses the results of countermeasures taken during the week to address problems identified the week before. Through personal interactions in such Quality Circle group settings, Toyota employees share their ideas for improvement, throw steps to test new ideas for improvement, and assess the results of their tests.This knowledge management practice, which is repeated weekly as an intrinsic part of the Toyota production system, progressively identifies, eliminates, and even balks errors. As improvements developed by Quality Circles are hive away over many years, Toyotas production system has become one of the highest quality production processes in the world (Spear and Bowen 1999). 5 The Explicit Knowledge Approach In contrast to the views held by the tacit knowledge approach, the explicit knowledge approach holds that knowledge is something that corporation be explained y individuals even though some effort and even some forms of assistance may sometimes be require d to help individuals phrase what they know. As a result, the explicit knowledge approach assumes that the useful knowledge of individuals in an organization idler be joint and make explicit. Working from the premise that important forms of knowledge bay window be do explicit, the explicit knowledge approach also believes that formal organizational processes can be utilise to help individuals enunciate the knowledge they have to create knowledge assets.The explicit knowledge approach also believes that explicit knowledge assets can then be disseminated within an organization with documents, drawings, standard operating procedures, manuals of beaver practice, and the like. Information systems are usually seen as playing a central role in facilitating the dissemination of explicit knowledge assets over company intranets or between organizations via the internet. Usually accompanying the views that knowledge can be do explicit and managed explicitly is the belief that new kn owledge can be created by means of a structured, managed, scientific learning process.Experiments and other forms of structured learning processes can be designed to still important knowledge deficiencies, or market interject transactions or st vagabondgic partnering may be employ to obtain specific forms of needed knowledge or to improve an organizations existing knowledge assets. The recommendations for knowledge management practice usually proposed by researchers and consultants working within the explicit knowledge approach focus on initiating and sustaining organizational processes for generating, articulating, categorizing, and systematically leveraging explicit knowledge assets. Some examples of knowledge management practice in this mode help to illustrate this approach. In the 1990s, Motorola was the global leader in the market for pagers. To maintain this leadership position, Motorola introduced new generations of pager designs every 12-15 months. Each new pager genera tion was designed to offer more advanced features and options for customization than the preceding generation. In addition, a new factory with higher- rush along, more elastic assembly lines was designed and built to produce each new generation of pager. To sustain this high rate of product and process development, Motorola formed aggroups of product and factory designers to design each new generation of pager and factory. At the beginning of their project, each new group of designers received a manual of design methods and techniques from the aggroup that had developed the previous generation of pager and factory.The new team would then have three deliverables at the end of their project (i) an improved and more configurable next-generation pager design, (ii) the design of a more efficient and negotiable assembly line for the factory that would produce the new pager, and (iii) an improved design manual that incorporated the design knowledge provided to the team in the manual i t received plus the new and improved design methods that the team had developed to meet the product and production goals for its project.This manual would then be passed on to the next design team given the task of developing the next generation of pager and its factory. In this way, Motorola sought to make explicit and capture the knowledge developed by its engineers during each project and to systematically leverage that knowledge in launching the work of the next project team. In addition to its tacit knowledge management practice of moving new employees around to transfer knowledge of its production system, Toyota also follows a highly Using modular product architectures to create increasingly configurable product designs, Motorola was able to increase the number of customizable product variations it could offer from a few thousand variations in the late 1980s to more than 120 jillion variations by the late 1990s. 7 disciplined explicit knowledge management practice of documen ting the tasks that each team of workers and each individual worker is asked to perform on its assembly lines.These documents provide a detailed description of how each task is to be performed, how long each task should take, the sequence of steps to be followed in performing each task, and the steps to be taken by each worker in checking his or her take in work (Spear and Bowen 1999). When improvements are suggested by solving problems on the assembly line as they occur or in the weekly Quality Circle meetings of Toyotas teams of assembly line workers, those suggestions are evaluated by Toyotas production engineers and then formally incorporated in revised task description documents.In addition to developing well-defined and documented process descriptions for routine, repetitive production tasks, some organizations have also created explicit knowledge management approaches to supporting more creative tasks like developing new products. In the Chrysler unit of DaimlerChrysler Cor poration, for example, several plan teams of 300-600 development engineers have responsibility for creating the next generation platforms4 on which Chryslers next automobiles will be based.Each platform team is free to actively explore and evaluate preference design solutions for the many different technical aspects of their vehicle platform. However, each platform team is also required to place the design solution it has selected for each aspect of their vehicle platform in a Book of Knowledge on Chryslers intranet. This catalog of developed design solutions is then made available to all platform teams to consult in their development processes, so that good design solutions developed by one platform team can also be located and used by other platform teams.Other firms have taken this explicit knowledge management approach to managing knowledge in product development processes even further. For example, GE 4 A platform accepts a system of standard part types and standardized i nterfaces between section types that enable plugging and playing different section variations in the platform design to configure different product variations (see Sanchez 2004). 8 Fanuc Automation, one of the worlds leading industrial automation firms, develops design methodologies that are applied in the design of new kinds of components for their factory automation systems.In effect, instead of leaving it up to each engineer in the firm to devise a design solution for each new component needed, GE Fanucs engineers work together to create detailed design methodologies for each type of component the firm uses. These design methodologies are then encoded in software and computerized so that the design of new component variations can be automated. Desired performance parameters for each new component variation are entered into the automated design program, and GE Fanucs computer system automatically generates a design solution for the component.In this way, GE Fanuc tries to make explicit and capture the design knowledge of its engineers and then to systematically re-use that knowledge by automating approximately new component design tasks. 9 Advantages and Disadvantages of Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge Approaches Like most alternative approaches to managing, each of the two knowledge management approaches we have discussed has both advantages and disadvantages.We now briefly summarize the main advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches (these are also summarized in Table 2). Advantages and Disadvantages of the Tacit Knowledge Approach One of the main advantages of the tacit knowledge approach is that it is a relatively uncomplicated and inexpensive way to begin managing knowledge. The essential first step is a relatively simple one identify what each individual in the organization believes is the specific kinds of knowledge he or she possesses.Managers can then use this knowledge to particularize individuals to key tasks or to compose teams wi th appropriate sets of knowledge to carry out a project, to improve performance in current processes, or to try to create new knowledge in the organization. As Philips did with its intranetbased yellow pages, managers may also elect to create an open database listing the knowledge claimed by individuals in the organization to facilitate knowledge sharing between individuals.A tacit knowledge approach may also lead to improvements in employee satisfaction and motivation when an organization officially recognizes and makes visible in the organization the kinds of knowledge that individual workers claim to have. In addition, the tacit knowledge approach is likely to avoid some of the practical and motivational difficulties that may be encountered in trying to secure the cooperation of individuals in fashioning their knowledge explicit (discussed under the explicit knowledge approach below). 10A further advantage often claimed for tacit knowledge management approaches derives from the view that making knowledge explicit increases the luck that knowledge will be leaked from an organization, so that leaving knowledge in tacit form also helps to protect a firms proprietary knowledge from diffusing to competing organizations. (The potential disadvantages of leaving knowledge in tacit form are summarized below. ) Although relatively open to begin, the tacit knowledge approach also has some important long-term limitations and disadvantages.One disadvantage in the tacit knowledge approach is that individuals in an organization may claim to have knowledge that they do not actually have or may claim to be more knowledgeable than they really are (Stein and Ridderstrale 2001). The knowledge that various individuals have is likely to evolve over time and may require denounce updating to correctly communicate the type of knowledge each individual in the organization claims to have now.In addition, if knowledge only remains tacit in the heads of individuals in an organizatio n, then the only way to fit knowledge within the organization is to move people. Moving people is often costly and time-consuming and may be resisted by individuals who fear disruptions of their careers or family life. Even when knowledgeable individuals are willing to be moved, an individual can only be in one place at a time and can only work so many hours per day and days per week, thereby limiting the reach and the quicken of the organization in transferring an individuals knowledge.Moreover, sometimes transferred individuals may not be accepted by other groups in the organization or may otherwise fail to establish good plangency with other individuals, and the desired knowledge transfer may not take place or may occur only partially. Most seriously, leaving knowledge tacit in the heads of key individuals creates a risk that the organization may lose that knowledge if any of those individuals becomes 11 incapacitated , leaves the organization, or in the blister case is rec ruited by competitors. Advantages and Disadvantages of the Explicit Knowledge Approach In general, the advantages and disadvantages of the explicit knowledge approach shape an inverted mirror image of the advantages and disadvantages of the tacit knowledge approach. Whereas the tacit knowledge approach is relatively easy to start and use, but has important limitations in the benefits it can bring, the explicit knowledge approach is much more challenging to start, but offers greater potential benefits in the long term.Let us first consider the long-term advantages of the explicit knowledge management approach, and then the challenges that have to be overcome to start and sustain this approach in an organization. Perhaps the main advantage of the explicit knowledge approach is that once an individual articulates his or her knowledge in a document, drawing, process description, or other form of explicit knowledge asset, it should be possible through use of information systems to quick ly disseminate that knowledge throughout an organization or indeed anywhere in the world.In effect, converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge creates an asset that is available 24/7 and is free from the limitations of time and space that constrain the dissemination of tacit knowledge by moving individuals. Moreover, knowledge that has been made explicit within an organization can often be more conservatively codified and more effectively leveraged than tacit knowledge assets. To codify some forms of knowledge is to categorize and order the knowledge so that important inter kinships between different kinds of knowledge within the firm can 5Of course, under patent, copy obligation, or trade secrecy laws, an organization may have intellectual property counterbalances in the tacit knowledge developed by individuals in the organization, and these rights may discourage though not entirely prevent individuals from sharing such knowledge with other organizations. 12 be identifi ed. For example, forms of knowledge that are related by sharing a similar theoretical or practical knowledge base can be identified, as can forms of ( concomitantary) knowledge that are interrelated by being used together in an organizations processes.Once the various forms of explicit knowledge in an organization are codified in this way, knowledge created in one part of an organization can be proactively leveraged through information systems to people and groups elsewhere in the organization that can benefit from having that knowledge. Moreover, by disseminating some instance of explicit knowledge to other individuals who have expertise in that knowledge domain, the explicit knowledge can be discussed, debated, tried further, and improved, thereby stimulating important incremental forms of organizational learning processes.Such processes also help to identify which individuals in the organization are actually capable of making significant contributions to the organizations knowle dge base, and which are not. An important further advantage of systematically articulating and codifying an organizations knowledge is that this process makes an organizations current knowledge base more visible and analyzable, and this helps an organization to discover deficiencies in its knowledge assets.In effect, by making an organizations current knowledge base more visible, so that the organization can begin to see more clearly what knowledge it does have, it should be possible for an organization to begin to see more clearly what knowledge it does not have. Focused, structured, managed learning processes to remedy important knowledge deficiencies can then be launched and may lead to more radical forms of organizational learning.Once an organization establishes processes for articulating, codifying, and leveraging explicit knowledge assets, the systematic dissemination of explicit knowledge within the organization should minimize the risk that it will lose vital knowledge if k ey individuals become unavailable or leave the organization. 13 To obtain the potentially significant benefits of an explicit knowledge management approach, however, a number of organizational challenges must be overcome. These challenges turf out primarily in assuring adequate articulation, evaluation, application, and protection of knowledge assets.Individuals may not have adequate skill or motivation to articulate their useful knowledge. Individuals vary greatly in the precision with which they can state their ideas, and some individuals perhaps many may need organizational support to adequately articulate their knowledge into useful knowledge assets. 6 Providing organizational support to individuals to articulate their knowledge may have a significant financial cost and inevitably takes time. An even more fundamental challenge arises when an individual is capable of articulating his or her knowledge, but resists requests by the organization to do so.At the heart of such resis tance is usually a belief that an individuals job security or position of influence in an organization depends on the tacit knowledge that he or she has and that the organization needs. Such beliefs result in fear that full revelation of an individuals important knowledge would be followed by press release or loss of influence in an organization, because presumably the individual would no longer be as necessary or important to the organization. Overcoming such fears is likely to require a profound rethinking of the employment relationship in many organizations, especially with regard to key knowledge workers.New employment norms may have to be defined and institutionalized that both seek and punish ongoing learning by individuals and their continuing contributions of explicit knowledge to the organization. 7 6 Of course, the more knowledge-intensive an organizations work is, and the more an organization is populate by knowledge workers with advanced education and training in for mally communicating their ideas, the less difficult the articulation of explicit knowledge within the organization should be. Further, not all knowledge of individuals will unavoidably be worth more to the organization than it may cost the organization to help or to reward individuals who try to articulate their knowledge. Essentially, managers must try to understand when the marginal cost of articulating knowledge is becoming greater than the marginal benefit of 14 Organizations must also meet the challenge of adequately evaluating knowledge that has been made explicit by individuals.Individuals with different backgrounds, education, and organizational roles may have varying sets of knowledge, with resulting differences in their deeply held ideas about the most effective way to get something done. Such differences will be revealed in the process of making their ideas and knowledge explicit, and managers implementing explicit knowledge approaches must establish a process for evalua ting the individual knowledge that has been made explicit and for resolving conflicting knowledge beliefs of individuals.Organizations with experience in managing this process have found that the people seed in such evaluation processes must be respected within the organization for their expertise, objectivity, and impartiality. In most organizations, the time of such people is usually both very valuable and in concisely supply, and involving such people in evaluating explicit knowledge in many forms may impose a significant cost on the organization (although the resulting benefits may far outweigh the costs).Since knowledge is useful to an organization only when it is applied in action, a further challenge in implementing explicit knowledge management approaches is assuring that knowledge supply in one part of the organization is not rejected or ignored by other parts of the organization simply because they prefer to stay close to their own familiar knowledge base i. e. , becau se of an intra-organizational not invented here syndrome. One approach to managing this concern is the implementation of organizational vanquish knowledge and outdo practice practices.In this practice, the committee of experts responsible for a knowledge evaluation process (discussed above) examines both the theoretical knowledge and practical applications of knowledge articulated within the organization, and defines the best(p) extracting the next office of knowledge from an individual. Since no one currently knows exactly how to make such a cost-benefit analysis at the margin, as a practical matter organizations that implement the explicit knowledge approach do not strictly try to optimize this process and tend to prefer to err on the side of articulating more -rather than less knowledge. 5 knowledge and best practice in applying that knowledge currently available within the organization. The various groups within the organization to whom this knowledge or practice applies ar e then required all to adopt and use the currently defined best knowledge and best practice, or to demonstrate convincingly to the committee of experts that they have developed better knowledge or better practice in applying knowledge.If a group persuades the expert committee that their knowledge or practice is better than the currently defined best knowledge or best practice in the organization, the expert committee then modifies the current best knowledge or best practice for the organization in light of the new knowledge they have received from the group. Implementing such a rocess for assuring that an organizations best knowledge and practice are actually used requires a high degree of organizational discipline in adhering to the organizations current best knowledge and best practice, and such discipline will normally require construct a high degree of organizational trust that the process of the expert committee for deciding best knowledge and best practice is objective, impa rtial, and transparent. Finally, an organization that creates explicit knowledge assets must take care that those assets remain within the boundaries of the organization and do not leak to other organizations, especially competitors.Security measures of the type most organizations now routinely use to protect their databases must be extended to provide security for the organizations explicit knowledge base. 16 Conclusions As described above, the tacit and explicit knowledge management approaches involve quite different emphases and practices, and one might naturally be led to ask, Which approach is right? As with most alternative approaches to management issues, however, the answer is Both are right but in the right combination. As the discussion in this chapter has suggested, there are important advantages to be obtained through both the tacit and explicit knowledge management approaches, and in many respects, the advantages of each approach can be used to help offset the disadva ntages of the other. In any organization, therefore, the goal is to create a hybrid design for its knowledge management practice that synthesizes the right combination and balance of the tacit and explicit knowledge management approaches.What the right combination and balance may consist of will vary with a number of factors the technology the organization uses or could use, the market conditions it faces, the knowledge intensity of its strategies and operations, the current attitudes of its key knowledge workers toward the organization, the degree of geographical sprinkling of its knowledge workers, the resources available to the organization to invest in developing infrastructure and processes for its knowledge management practice, and so on.However, some basic guidelines may be suggested. Organizations that have not implemented systematic knowledge management approaches should in most cases begin with tacit knowledge management practices of the type discussed in this chapter. S uch practices are relatively inexpensive, fast to implement, and less challenging organizationally than full-blown explicit knowledge management practices, and they often create surprising organizational interest in and energy for developing more extensive knowledge management practices.In any event, implementation of tacit knowledge management practices should be seen and communicated within the organization as only the first step in an evolving management 17 process that will eventually include more formal and systematic explicit knowledge management practices. Achieving some initial organizational successes through use of tacit knowledge practices also helps to build confidence that the much greater organizational demands conglomerate in implementing explicit knowledge management practices will be worth the effort.We have discussed here a number of reasons why in the long run organizations that manage to implement effective explicit knowledge approaches not only will be more eff ective at leveraging their knowledge, but will also become better learning organizations. When the respective advantages of tacit and explicit knowledge management practices can be combined, an organization should be able to develop and apply new knowledge faster and more extensively than organizations that do not try to manage knowledge or that use only tacit or only explicit knowledge management practices.Thus, the eventual goal for most organizations will be to devise and implement hybrid knowledge management practices in which explicit knowledge management practices complement and significantly extend their initial tacit knowledge practices. 18 References Sanchez, Ron (2004). Creating modular platforms for strategic flexibility, Design Management Review, Winter 2004, 58-67. Sanchez, Ron (2001). Managing knowledge into competences The five learning cycles of the competent organization, 3-37 in Knowledge Management and Organizational Competence, Ron Sanchez, editor, Oxford Oxford University Press.Sanchez, Ron (1997). Managing articulated knowledge in competence-based competition, 163-187 in Strategic Learning and Knowledge Management, Ron Sanchez and Aime Heene, editors, Chichester John Wiley & Sons. Spear, Steven, and H. Kent Bowen (1999). Decoding the DNA of the Toyota takings System, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1999, 97-106. Stein, Johan, and Jonas Ridderstrale (2001). Managing the dissemination of competences, 63-76 in Knowledge Management and Organizational Competence, Ron Sanchez, editor, Oxford Oxford University Press. 19 Table 1Basic Beliefs in Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge Management Approaches Tacit Knowledge Approach Explicit Knowledge Approach Knowledge is personal in nature and very difficult to extract from people. Knowledge can be articulated and codified to create explicit knowledge assets. Knowledge must be transferred by moving people within or between organizations. Knowledge can be disseminated (using information technol ogies) in the form of documents, drawings, best practices, etc. Learning must be encouraged by bringing the right people together under the right circumstances.Learning can be designed to remedy knowledge deficiencies through structured, managed, scientific processes. 20 Table 2 Advantages and Disadvantages of Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge Management Approaches Tacit Knowledge Approach Explicit Knowledge Approach Advantages Advantages Relatively easy and inexpensive to begin. Articulated knowledge (explicit knowledge assets) may be moved instantaneously anytime anywhere by information technologies. Employees may respond well to recognition of the (claimed) knowledge. promising to create interest in further knowledge anagement processes. Important knowledge kept in tacit form may be less likely to leak to competitors. Codified knowledge may be proactively disseminated to people who can use specific forms of knowledge. Knowledge that has been made explicit can be discussed, debated , and improved. qualification knowledge explicit makes it possible to discover knowledge deficiencies in the organization. Disadvantages Disadvantages Individuals may not have the knowledge they claim to have. Considerable time and effort may be required to help people articulate their knowledge.Knowledge profiles of individuals need frequent updating. Ability to transfer knowledge constrained to moving people, which is costly and limits the reach and speed of knowledge dissemination within the organization. Organization may lose key knowledge if key people leave the organization. Employment relationship with key knowledge workers may have to be redefined to motivate knowledge articulation. Expert committees must be formed to evaluate explicit knowledge assets. Application of explicit knowledge throughout organization must be assured by adoption of best practices. 21 22