In this blog entry, I would like to open up discussion about the nature and management of one of our most valuable resources: knowledge. Although its nature and use can be quite elusive, the emerging field of knowledge management draws upon our collective inquiry and seeks to harness it for use in our professional lives.
I welcome your thoughts about the nature and use of knowledge in this context and any ideas that you have about how we might effectively manage it as individuals and organizations. Of course, as we are using a blog, it is a great candidate as an example under this topic.
Corporate memory is often incomplete because it has captured only explicit knowledge. KM also attempts to make accessible the valuable tacit knowledge, which is added to the corporate memory. While it is possible to reuse tacit knowledge, reuse tends to refer to packaged explicit knowledge. Reuse of explicit knowledge is a long-term advantage. Where as tacit knowledge reuse can benefit the individual who sought the advice of a more experienced colleague, knowledge objects that are accessible through the knowledge repository are accessible to all workers and they remain so far as long as they are useful.
Doc, I really like that you pointed out blogs as a source for KM. In fact, I feel like as a culture we’re moving toward learning predominately through blogs instead of other sources. Blogs are slowly taking over newspapers as reliable source of information (at least, readership keeps growing). As blog sites become more organized and gain more credibility this is only going to hold more true.
Thanks Paresh and Allen for your initial comments on this blog entry about knowledge management.
Paresh raises a good point about the value of expert knowledge in codified and contextual explicit form in a knowledge repository accessible to organizational members. I would add that the challenge remains in how to best represent that knowledge and help more novice members learn from it. I think blogs can offer a platform for self-acknowledged “experts” to share their perspectives in a given domain of knowledge and allow a dialog with interested readers.
Allen’s point is well taken about the emergence of blogs and their “disintermediating” influence on how ideas and opions are shared online – instead of from only a few sources being read by many, we are witnessing a great expansion of this type of communication due to the low barriers to entry and the great interest in the narrow-casting nature of information provided by bloggers. Although in a journal format, it is usually interactive and collaborative so that communities of practice can leverage this as a tool for their needs.