Management Question

Knowledge Management in Theory
and Practice
Lecture 5: Knowledge Sharing and
Communities of Practice

Recap: KM Cycle Processes
 Knowledge Capture
 Knowledge Creation & Contribution
 Knowledge Codification & Refinement (inc. Sanitize) &
Reconstruction (e.g. synthesis)
 Selectively filter contributions
 Knowledge Modeling
 Knowledge Sharing & Pooling
 Knowledge Organization &Access
 Knowledge Learning &Application
 Knowledge Evaluation & Re-Use OR Divest

2

Overview
Knowledge Sharing
◼

Communities of Practice
⚫ Building blocks
⚫ Types of communities
⚫ Roles and Responsibilities

◼

Directories of Experts
⚫ Yellow pages
⚫ Skill mining

◼

Mapping the Flow of Knowledge
⚫ Organizational networks and Sociograms

3

What is a Community of
Practice (CoP)?
Traditionally, we have shared
knowledge through ‘word of
mouth’ (e.g. master to apprentice)
While socializing comes ‘naturally’
to us, there are fewer opportunities
in today’s much larger, much more
global companies
It was easy to do in the past:
coffee/smoker cliques, water cooler conversations…..
4

But:
In Today’s Working Environment
Multi-lingual
Multi-site

Multi-cultural

More &
Faster

More
Global

KM

More
Mobile

More
Connected
5

What is a Community of
Practice (CoP)?
 Definition of “Community”
“A group of people having common interests:
the scientific community, the international
business community”
◼ Similarity or identity: a community of interests
◼ Sharing, participation, fellowship
◼

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd Ed. 1996.
6

Community Definition
(continued)
 “The body of people in a learned occupation:
“the news spread rapidly through the medical
community”
Common interests
◼ Agreement as to goals
◼

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

7

Community Definition
(continued)
 The word has been in the English language since
the 14th century
Comes from the Latin
◼ “The quality of holding something in common”
◼ A sense of common identity and characteristics
◼ More direct, more immediate and more significant
relationships than in formal organized societies
◼ Sharing of common goals, values, identities;
participatory decision-making
◼

8

What is a virtual community?
 “social aggregations that emerge from the
Net when people carry on those public
discussions long enough, with sufficient
human feeling, to form webs of personal
relationships”
Knowledge is social
as well as individual

(The Virtual Community, Howard
Rheingold, 1993)

9

What is a Practice?
 A customary way of operation or
behaviour
 Translating an idea into action
 The exercise of a profession
 Knowledge of how something is
customarily done
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
“There can be no knowledge
without a knower”

Knowledge is dynamic
in nature
10

What is a Community of
Practice in the KM World?
 “A group of individuals informally bound together by
shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”
(Snyder and Wenger)

 Peers in the execution of real work. What holds them
together is a common sense of purpose and a real
need to know what each other knows” (John Seely
Brown)

 “Focused on the more professional nature of work.
It’s trying to find a better way of doing work” (From
the field….)

11

Putting the pieces together
 The term “community” suggests that CoPs are
not constrained by typical geographic, business
unit or functional boundaries but rather by
common tasks, contexts and interests.
 The word “practice” implies knowledge in
action – how individuals actually perform
their jobs on a day-to-day basis as opposed to
more formal policies and procedures that
reflect how work should be performed.
Lesser & Prusak, IBM Institute for KM
12

Community of Practice

A group of people
informally bound together
by shared expertise
and passion for a joint enterprise

13
Source: Etienne Wenger

Dimensions of Practice as the
property of a community
Joint enterprise

Mutual engagement

Shared repertoire

14

Dimensions of Practice as the
property of a community
Joint enterprise

Mutual engagement

Shared repertoire

What is the “work” of community members?
e.g. KM practitioners
Heterogeneous
Complementary

15

Dimensions of Practice as the
property of a community
What are the accepted objectives
of the community?
Joint enterprise

Mutual engagement

Negotiated consensus
Mutual accountability

Shared repertoire

What is the “work” of community members?
e.g. KM practitioners
Heterogeneous
Complementary

16

Dimensions of Practice as the
property of a community
What are the accepted objectives
of the community?

‘Knowledge is local,
sticky and contextual”
Joint enterprise

Mutual engagement

What is the “work” of community members?
e.g. KM practitioners
Heterogeneous
Complementary

Negotiated consensus
Mutual accountability

Shared repertoire

Artifacts: routines, tools, stories,
ways of doing things, language,
concepts, history, discourse
Shared virtual space

17

How are Communities of
Practice Different?
Community
of Practice
Work Group
Project
Team
Informal
networks

Purpose
Exchange
knowledge

Membership
Self select

Deliver
product
Accomplish
specific task

All under
manager
Assigned or
selected

Pass on
business
information

Friends &
business
acquaintances

Glue
Passion,
identification
with group
Job &
common goal
Project
milestones
and goal
Mutual need

Duration
As long as the
interest lasts
Until
restructured
Project
completed
As long as
reason exists

(excerpt from “Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier, by Etienne Wenger)
18

A Community of Practice

Experts,
Mentors

*LPP – Legitimate peripheral participant

Members

Lurkers*

19

Multiple Communities
Lurker in one,
mentor in
another
Overlapping
Communities

A
community
waiting to
happen

Knowledge brokers

20

Multiple Communities

Boundary objects
Artifacts: tools, documents, models shared by CoP’s.
Discourses: a common language that can be shared across CoPs
Processes: shared processes, routines, procedures that
facilitate coordination of and between CoPs
21

The Value Added by
Communities of Practice
The help drive strategy
They start new lines of business
They solve problems quickly
They transfer best practices
They develop professional skills
They help companies recruit and retain talent
22
Source: Etienne Wenger

Benefits of
Communities of Practice
 For the organization
Help drive strategy
◼ Solve problems quickly
◼ Diffuse best practices
◼ Cross-fertilize ideas, increase
opportunities for innovation
◼ Build organizational memory
◼

23

CoP Benefits (continued)
 For the community
Develop professional skills
◼ Develop a common language
◼ Improve continuously
◼ LEARN
◼

24

CoP Benefits (continued)
• For the individual
• Help people do their jobs & save time
• Building a sense of community bonds
within organization
• Helps people to keep up to date
• Provides challenges and
opportunities to contribute

25

Why are CoPs important now?
 Knowledge increasingly recognized as a strategic
intellectual asset
 Cannot be left to chance – need to actively,
systematically organize, and disseminate
knowledge
 CoPs are a good way of doing this
 CoPs need librarians, archivists,
taxonomists….”knowledge stewards”
26

A Paradox of Management
Although communities of practice are
fundamentally informal and self-organizing,
they benefit from cultivation.
How to cultivate them:
identify potential communities of practice that will
enhance the company’s strategic capabilities
◼ provide the infrastructure that will support them
and enable them to apply their expertise effectively
◼ use nontraditional methods to assess their value
27
◼

Community Building Blocks
 Collective identity
 Community type
 Community roles and responsibilities
 Community membership
 Collaborative work environment

28

Community Types
 Helping Communities
◼

Provide a forum for community members to help each
other solve everyday work problems

 Best Practice Communities
◼

Develop and disseminate best practices, guidelines and
procedures for members’ use

 Knowledge Stewarding Communities
◼

Organize, manage, and steward a body of knowledge
from which members can draw

 Innovation Communities
◼

Create breakthrough ideas, knowledge & practices

29

Community Roles and
Responsibilities
 Functional sponsor
◼

Believes in and promotes the value of knowledge
sharing and community membership

 Core team
 Community Leader
 Community Facilitator
 Logistics Coordinator
30

Community Core Team
 Use their knowledge of the discipline to
judge what is important, groundbreaking and
useful
 Enrich information by summarizing,
combining, contrasting and integrating
information into the knowledgebase
 Establish a taxonomy for the knowledgebase
31

How Knowledge Workers Spend their Time

Other

22 %
18 %
Production

60%

Research &
Validation
EDS 1996
32

How do we find information
online?
Phase I : on-line search

Phase II : off-line search

Succeed
5%

Fail
10%

Fail
95%

45 minutes spent on-line:
Searching:
Surfing:

5 min.
40 min.

Succeed
90%
After phoning for help, they
find what they are looking
for 90% of the time in less
than 5 min
33

Directories of Experts
 Research shows that even in companies with welldeveloped KM infrastructures, people still turn first
to other people as they seek solutions to problems
and knowledge
Knowledge flows are primarily through people
◼ What knowledge flows?
◼

⚫ Direct answer to question
⚫ Metaknowledge

⚫ Help in reformulating the problem…..

34

Skill Mining
 Similar to data mining
 Purpose is to identify who within an
enterprise has the expertise required to help a
knowledge worker with a specific issue
Manual – Knowledge Support Offices
◼ Automated – Abuzz, Autonomy, Dataware
◼

 Tends to be better suited to ‘hard’ or
technical skills
35

Yellow Pages – Expert
Network Example
Trading strategy

Intelligence analysis

Investment strategy

Economic forecasting

Portfolio theory

Technical analysis

Portfolio selection

Company analysis

Securities selection

Industry and competitive
analysis
36

Yellow Pages Activity
 See handout
FOR INSTRUCTORS: you can develop a list of about
20 items such as: “knows how to fix a lawnmower”,
“can name 3 types of potatoes”, “has run a marathon.”
Draw a line next to each item. Ask students to find
someone in the class who has this type of “expertise”.
This is a method of developing yellow pages.

37

Social Network Analysis
(SNA)
 SNA is a diagnostic method for collecting and
analyzing data about patterns of relationships
among people in groups
Can identify patterns of interaction such as average
number of links between people in an organization or
community, the number of subgroups, information
bottlenecks, knowledge brokers
◼ Can help to improve knowledge flow, identify key
brokers and hoarders
◼ E.g. 6 degrees of separation
◼

38

SNA (continued)
 Example: if your goal is to build a more cohesive
knowledge network so people can access and
interact with one another more quickly, more
easily:
How well do you know and understand the skills and
experiences of other members?
◼ Is the type of knowledge held by this other person
important to the work that you do?
◼ Do you find it easy to access other people when you need
help?
◼

39

Knowledge Flow Analysis Example: Finding Hidden Experts

Rosa and Thomas are
`hidden` experts

Orphaned database

40

SNA (continued)
 Based on the results of the analysis, you may decide
to:
Reorganize
◼ Introduce new specific roles e.g. moderator to assist in
knowledge transfer
◼ Technologies to support expertise location, virtual
meetings, as well as face-to-face meetings
◼ Introduce a shared goal they can work towards or theme
of interest for discussion
◼ Self-awareness may be enough (“yikes – I am a
knowledge black hole!)
◼

41

Mapping the Flow of
Knowledge
Portal

Jack

Sue
Knowledge request
Knowledge response
42

Sociogram Example
 Draw a sociogram of a community you belong to:
Family
◼ Friends
◼ Peers – e.g. have you exchanged knowledge with anyone in this
◼

class? How? (email, conversation, phone) for what purpose?
(assignment) with anyone outside the class on the topic of
CoPs/KM? Who?

Hobby groups
◼ Interest groups
◼

43

Next:
 Knowledge Acquisition and Application

44

Chapter 01: Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice
The ability to manage knowledge is crucial in today’s knowledge economy.
•
•

Where creation and diffusion of knowledge are increasingly important factors in competitiveness.
Knowledge is a valuable commodity now that is:
o Embedded in products, especially hi-tech products.
o Embedded in the tacit knowledge of highly mobile employees.

•
o
o
o
o

Some paradoxical characteristics of knowledge assets:
Using knowledge does not consume it.
Transferring knowledge does not lose it.
Knowledge is abundant, but the ability to use it is scarce.
Much of Org knowledge walks out the door at the end of the day.

Key KM concepts and their definitions:
1. The Two Major Types of Knowledge: Tacit and explicit knowledge:
• Tacit knowledge is difficult to articulate and difficult to put into words, text, or drawings.
o reside within the heads of knowers.
• Explicit knowledge represents content that has been captured in some tangible form such as words,
audio recordings, or images.
o contained within tangible or concrete media.
Comparison of properties of tacit versus explicit knowledge
Properties of tacit knowledge
Properties of explicit knowledge
Ability to adapt, to deal with new and exceptional
situations
Expertise, know-how, know-why, and care-why
Ability to collaborate, to share a vision, to transmit a
culture
Coaching and mentoring to transfer experiential knowledge
on a one-to-one, face-to-face basis

Ability to disseminate, to reproduce, to access and re-apply
throughout the organization
Ability to teach to train
Ability to organize, to systematize, to translate a vision into a
mission statement, into operational guidelines
Transfer knowledge via products, services, and documented
processes

2. The word practice implies knowledge in action — how individuals actually perform their jobs on a day-today basis.
3. Knowledge to create value.
From physical assets to knowledge assets: Knowledge has increasingly become more valuable than the more
traditional physical or tangible assets.
• SABRE reservation system vs. airplanes.
• Now – customer bill of rights, vouchers for delayed flights – Customer satisfaction (and revenues) at an alltime low.
• Intellectual capital: is often made visible by the difference between the book value and the market value
of an organization (often referred to as goodwill).
o
o
o
•

Competence The skills necessary to achieve a certain (high) level of performance.
Capability Strategic skills necessary to integrate and apply competencies.
Technologies Tools and methods required to produce certain physical results.

Intellectual assets: are represented by the sum total of what employees of the organization know and
know how to do.
o levels of an organization found at the strategic, tactical, and operational.

Organizational Perspectives on Knowledge Management: Wiig (1993) considers KM in organizations from
three perspectives, each with different horizons and purposes:
1. Business perspective: Focusing on why, where, and to what extent the organization must invest in or
exploit knowledge. easily maps onto the strategic nature of KM.
2. Management perspective: Focusing on determining, organizing, directing, facilitating, and monitoring
knowledge-related practices and activities required to achieve the desired business strategies and
objectives. to the tactical layer.
3. Hands-on perspective: Focusing on applying the expertise to conduct explicit knowledge-related work
and tasks. may be equated with the operational level.
The Interdisciplinary nature of knowledge management:

The 3 Generations of KM:
• 1st Generation: the emphasis was placed on containers of knowledge or information technologies in
order to help us with the dilemma exemplified by the much quoted phrase “if we only knew what we
know” IT.
o A great many intranets and internal knowledge management systems were implemented during the
first KM generation
• 2nd Generation: Reeling from information overload, the second generation swung to the opposite end of
the spectrum, to focus on people; this could be phrased “if we only knew who knows about….” PEOPLE .
• 3rd Generation: “if we could only organize our knowledge….” CONTENT devoted to content
management.
Why Is KM Important Today? The major business drivers behind today ’ s increased interest and application of
KM lie in four key areas:
1. Globalization of business: Organizations today are more global — multisite, multilingual, and
multicultural in nature.
2. Leaner organizations: We are doing more and we are doing it faster, but we also need to work smarter
as knowledge workers — increased pace and workload.
3. Corporate amnesia: We are more mobile as a workforce, which creates problems of knowledge
continuity for the organization.
4. Technological advances: We are more connected — information technology advances have made
connectivity not only ubiquitous but has radically changed expectation.

•

Today’s work environment is more complex due to an increase in the number of subjective knowledge
items we need to attend to everyday.
o Filtering over 200 emails, faxes, voicemail messages on a daily basis – how to prioritize?
o Having to “think on our feet” as expected response time has greatly decreased as well
o KM represent one response to the challenge of trying to manage this complexity amidst information
overload
o As such, KM is perhaps best categorized as a science of complexity.
— Knowledge and entropy production have an inverse relationship

KM for Individuals, Communities, and Organizations: This three-tiered view of KM helps emphasize why KM is
important today:
o Summary of the three major components of KM: Containers, Communities, Content.
•

For the individual, KM:
o Helps people do their jobs and save time through better decision making and problem solving.
o Builds a sense of community bonds within the organization .
o Helps people to keep up to date .
o Provides challenges and opportunities to contribute.

•
o
o
o
o
o
•

For the community of practice, KM:
Develops professional skills .
Promotes peer-to-peer mentoring .
Facilitates more effective networking and collaboration .
Develops a professional code of ethics that members can adhere to .
Develops a common language.

For the organization, KM:
o Helps drive strategy
o Solves problems quickly
o Diffuses best practices
o Improves knowledge embedded in products and services
o Cross-fertilizes ideas and increases opportunities for innovation
o Enables organizations to better stay ahead of the competition
o Builds organizational memory

Applicant Information to hire:
Curriculum vitae (resume)
Test results (e.g. language, aptitude)
Reason why they are applying
Request they demonstrate bilingualism

References
Previous experience
Role-playing or decision simulation

The ubiquitous “shared drive” All organizations have them:
• They tend to be chaotically organized, if at all:
– Organizing principles tacit
– Organize for me but what about others?

Next challenge: Preserving valuable knowledge Organizational “amnesia” or forgetting:
The cost of lost knowledge:
Once upon a time we put a man on the moon – today we can no longer do so. The blueprints for the Saturn
booster are no longer at NASA – the only rocket with enough thrust to send a manned payload on its way. The
original Apollo work- force is long since retired … some documents endure but they are devoid of meaning
(Petch, 1998)
NASA loses film of first moon landing:
The original film of man’s first steps on the moon have been lost. The original tapes, although nowhere near
the standard of normal tv transmission, would still be of far better quality than the video we have. NASA simply
filed them away. And as personnel retired or died, the location of the tapes was forgotten.
Concept Analysis Tech: A method to better understand (and ultimately define) complex, subjective and valueladen concepts.
• The concept analysis approach rests on the obtaining consensus around three major dimensions of a
given concept:
1. A list of key attributes.
2. A list of illustrative examples.
3. A list of illustrative nonexamples.
What is Knowledge Management? An informal survey conducted by the author identified over a 100 published
definitions of knowledge management and of these, at least 72 could be considered to be very good.
•

KM is the systematic, explicit and deliberate building, renewal and application of knowledge to maximize
an enterprise’s knowledge-related effectiveness and returns from knowledge assets (K. Wiig).

•

KM is the process of capturing a company’s collective expertise wherever it resides: in databases, on
paper, in people’s heads – and distributing it to wherever it can help produce the biggest payoff. (Hibbard).

•

KM is getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time so they can make the best decision
(Petrash).

More KM definition:
•

It is the attempt to recognize what is essentially a human asset buried in the minds of individuals, and
leverage it into an organizational asset that can be accessed and used by a broader set of individuals on
whose decisions the firm depends. —Larry Prusak.

•

KM applies systematic approaches to find, understand and use knowledge to create value (O’Dell).

•

KM is the explicit control and management of knowledge within an organization aimed at achieving the
company’s objectives (van der Spek).

•

KM is the formalization of and access to experience, knowledge, and expertise that create new
capabilities, enable superior performance, encourage innovation and enhance customer value (Beckman).

KM is: A management philosophy that takes systematic and explicit advantage of knowledge to make the
organization act more intelligently.
• Knowledge is used/applied for both operational and strategic purposes
• Ways to find, analyze, categorize critical knowledge areas to make sure appropriate knowledge is
available when and where needed.

KM is NOT: power, it is how you use it that matters!
• KM is not archiving all existing explicit knowledge
• A set of isolated techniques without a common framework
• A different label for IT, HR or training
• A command and control system for knowledge

Attributes – The concept “being green”
– Reduce the use of non-renewable resources
– A lifestyle or state of mind that involves making a choice to act towards sustainability
– Local vs. global and individual vs. group.
– Communal resources and consumption.
– Attitude of an individual, organization or community that is conscientious of the environment and dictates
their choices and actions.
– Way of thinking about waste reduction, awareness of consumption at the individual, corporate and
community level – scalable anywhere in between.
– Collaboration.
– Social phenomenon.
– Social and political components.
Key Points
o KM is not necessarily something completely new but has been practiced in a wide variety of settings
for some time now, albeit under different monikers.
o

Knowledge is more complex than data or information; it is subjective, often based on experience, and
highly contextual.

o

There is no generally accepted definition of KM, but most practitioners and professionals concur that
KM treats both tacit and explicit knowledge with the objective of adding value to the organization.

o

Each organization should defi ne KM in terms of the business objective; concept analysis is one way of
accomplishing this.

o

KM is all about applying knowledge in new, previously unencumbered or novel situations.

o

KM has its roots in a variety of different disciplines.

o

The KM generations to date have focused first on containers, next on communities, and finally on the
content itself

Chapter 02: The Knowledge Management Cycle
Major Approaches to the KM Cycle
Meyer and Zack KM Cycle
Bukowitz and Wiliams

McElroy KM Cycle
Wiig KM Cycle

KM Cycle Processes: encompassing the capture, creation, codification, sharing, accessing, applying, and reuse
of knowledge.
Effective knowledge management requires an organization to identify, generate, acquire, diffuse, and capture
the benefits of knowledge that provide a strategic advantage.
•

A clear distinction must be made between information which is digitized, and true knowledge assets
which exists only in intelligent systems.
o The knowledge information cycle looks at how information is transformed into knowledge and vice
versa via creation and application processes.

Knowledge-Information Cycle Processes:
o Establish appropriate information management systems and processes.
o One of the major KM processes Identify and locate knowledge and knowledge sources within the
organization.
o Valuable knowledge (translated into explicit information) to allow re-use economies to operate.
o Create networks, practices, and incentives to facilitate person-to-person knowledge transfer where the
focus is on the unique solution.
o Add personal knowledge management to the organizational repository (“corporate memory”) which also
called ground truth.
Meyer and Zack KM Cycle: derived from work on the design and development of information products.
•

Meyer and Zack ( 1996 ) propose that research and knowledge about the design of physical products can
be extended into the intellectual realm to serve as the basis for a KM cycle.
• The Meyers Zack model is an information-processing model:
o Adapted to knowledge content.
o The Notion of Refinement is a crucial stage in the KM cycle and often neglected .
• The Meyer and Zack model is one of the most complete descriptions of the key elements involved in the
knowledge management model
• Information products & Refinement.
Detailed view of the Zack Information Cycle analyzed the major developmental stages of a knowledge
repository, and these stages were mapped on to a KM cycle consisting of:
• Acquisition of data or information addresses the issues regarding sources of raw materials such as scope,
breadth.
• Refinement is the primary source of added value. This refinement may be physical or logical.
• Storage/retrieval forms a bridge between the upstream acquisition and refinement stages that feed the
repository and downstream stages of product generation.
• Distribution describes how the product is delivered to the end user.
• Presentation or use. It is here that context plays a very important role.

Bukowitz and Williams KM Cycle: outlines “ how organizations generate, maintain and deploy a strategically
correct stock of knowledge to create value.
•

Get: seeking out information needed to make decision, solve problems or innovate.
o Tacit and explicit.
o Being selective when faced with information overload.

•

Use: how to combine content in new and interesting ways to foster innovation in the organization.
o focus is primarily on individuals, and then on groups.

•

Learn: formal process of learning from experiences as a means of creating competitive advantage.

•

Contribute: getting employees to post what they have learned to a knowledge base.
o Link individual learning and knowledge to organizational memory.

•

Assess: evaluation of intellectual capital.
o deals more with the group and organizational level.
o Identify assets, metrics to assess them and link these directly to business objectives

•

Build/Sustain: ensures that future intellectual capital of the organization will keep the organization viable
and competitive.
Divest: The org should not hold on to assets that are no longer creating value.
o Transfer outside the organization e.g. outsourcing
o Traditional divestiture decisions regarding knowledge obtaining Patent, spin off companies etc.

•

-The get, learn, and contribute phases are tactical in nature, triggered by market-driven opportunities.
-The assess, build/sustain, and divest stages are more strategic in nature, triggered by shifts the macro
environment.
KM Cycle Processes (Bukowitz and Williams):
– Knowledge Capture
– Knowledge Creation & Contribution – Selectively filter contributions
– Knowledge Codification & Refinement – Knowledge Sharing
– Knowledge Access
– Knowledge Learning & Application
– Knowledge Evaluation & Re-Use OR Divest
McElroy KM Cycle: emphasizes that organizational knowledge is held both subjectively in the minds of
individuals and groups and objectively in explicit forms.
• describes a knowledge life cycle that consists of the knowledge processes of knowledge production
and knowledge integration.
• Knowledge use either meets or fails to meet business expectations. Matches lead to reuse.
• Mis-matches lead to adjustments in business processing behaviour (learning).
• Clear step where knowledge is evaluated and a conscious decision is made as to whether or
not it should be incorporated into organizational memory.
KM Cycle Processes (McElroy) – Knowledge Capture, Creation, Codification & Refinement, Sharing, Access,
Application, Knowledge Evaluation & Re-Use

Key Knowledge production processes in the McElroy KM Cycle:

Knowledge claim evaluation processes in the McElroy KM Cycle:
• Knowledge production to Organizational knowledge: Information about:
o Surviving knowledge claim
o Falsified knowledge claim
o Undecided knowledge claim
Wiig KM Cycle: focuses on the three conditions that need to be present for an organization to conduct its
business successfully:
• major advantages of the Wiig approach to the KM cycle is the clear and detailed description of how
organizational memory is put into: individuals, groups, and organization.
• There are four major steps or activities in Wiig cycle: Build knowledge, Hold knowledge, Pool
knowledge, Apply knowledge.
• Discrete tasks yet often interdependent & parallel.
Building knowledge refers to a wide range of activities ranging from market research, focus groups, surveys,
competitive intelligence, and data mining applications.
Build Knowledge:
o Learn from Personal experience. o Intelligence sources.
o Formal education and training.
o Media, books, peers.
Building Knowledge Consist of Five Major Activities:
1. Obtaining Knowledge: Knowledge creation may occur through:
• R&D projects, Innovations, experimentation, reasoning with existing knowledge and by Hire new
people.
• Import knowledge from existing sources ex: eliciting knowledge from experts, from manuals, by joint
venture or by Transfer people between departments.
• Observe the real world ex: Site Visit.
2. Analyzing Knowledge: consist of:
• Extracting what appears to be knowledge from obtained materials – ex: analyze transcripts and identify
themes, listen to an explanation, and select concepts for further consideration.
• Abstracting extracted material.
• Identifying patterns extracted.
• Explaining relations between knowledge fragments (e.g. compare and contrast, causal relations).
• Verifying that extracted materials correspond to meaning of original sources.

3. Reconstruct (Synthesize) Knowledge consists of Generalize analyzed materials to obtain broader
principles
• Generating hypotheses to explain observation,
• Establishing conformance between new and existing knowledge (validity, coherence).
• Update total knowledge pool by incorporating new knowledge.
o Discard old, false, outdated, no longer relevant knowledge.
4. Codify and Model Knowledge: Represent knowledge in our minds by building mental models.
• How we then assembling the knowledge into a coherent model.
• How we document the knowledge in books and manuals.
• How we Encode it into knowledge repository (computerized KBS tools).
5. Organize Knowledge: Organized knowledge for specific uses E.g. diagnostics, help desk, FAQs.
• according to an established organizational framework ex: standards Categorize.
•

This org is usually done using some: ontology, taxonomy, official list of key words, attributes,
linguistic/translation guidelines.

Hold Knowledge consists of remembering, cumulating knowledge in repositories, embedding knowledge in
repositories, and archiving knowledge.
Hold Knowledge:
o In people minds. o In tangible forms (e.g. books).
•

Remembering knowledge means that the individual has retained or remembered that item.
o knowledge has been internalized and understood by individuals.
• Cumulating knowledge in repositories: (creating a computer-resident base encoding it)
• Embedding knowledge in repositories (ensuring they are part of business procedures)
• Archive knowledge: creating a scientific library and by systematically retiring out of date, false, or no
longer relevant knowledge from the active repository
Hold Knowledge Examples:
• Held by companies includes intellectual property, patents.
• knowledge documented in the form of research reports, and technical papers, or tacit knowledge.
• which may be elicited and embedded in the knowledge base or repository.
o E.g. tips, tricks of the trade, case studies, videotapes of demonstrations by experts, and task support
systems.
Pool Knowledge: consists of coordinating knowledge, assembling knowledge, and accessing and retrieving
knowledge.
Pool Knowledge:
o KM systems (intranet, dbase). o Groups of people- brainstorm.
Pooling knowledge consists of:
• Coordinating knowledge Requires the formation of collaborative teams. Creating expert networks to
identify who knows what.
• Assembling knowledge Assembled into background references for libraries or repository in order to
make subsequent access and retrieval easier.
• Accessing and retrieving knowledge Consult with knowledgeable people about a difficult problem,
second opinion from expert or discussion with peer.
o Obtain knowledge directly from a repository as well – advice, or arrive decision.

Organizations may pool knowledge in a variety of ways:
• An employee may realizes he or she does not have the necessary knowledge and know-how to solve a
particular problem.
• The individual can contact others in the Org who have had similar problems to solve, consults the
knowledge repository and makes use of an expert advisory system to help her out.
•

The individual can then organizes all this information and has subject matter experts validate the content.

Use Knowledge:

o In work context.

Use Knowledge:
o Embedded in work processes.

Many potential ways to use or apply the knowledge to list exhaustively:
1. Use established knowledge to perform routine tasks, make standard products, provide standard services.
2. Use general knowledge to survey exceptional situations, identify problems, consequences.
3. Use knowledge to describe situations and scope problems.
4. Select relevant special knowledge to handle situations, identify knowledge sources.
5. Observe and characterize the situation, collect, and organize information.
6. Analyze situations, determine patterns, compare with others, judge what needs to be done.
7. Synthesize alternative solutions, identify options, create new solutions.
8. Evaluate potential alternatives, appraise advantages and disadvantages of each, determine risks.
9. Use knowledge to decide what to do. Ex: rank alternatives, select one and do a reality check.
10. Implement selected alternative. for example, execute the task, and authorize the team to proceed.
Using Knowledge – Examples
– Expert mechanic encounters a new problem
– Gathers info to diagnose and analyze
– Synthesizes a list of possible solutions with the tools he knows are available to him
– Decides on the best option and uses it to fix the part
– Non-routine tasks are approached in a different way than familiar, standard ones
An Integrated KM Cycle Summary
A synthesis of the key KM cycle steps from each of the four approaches:

Synthesis of knowledge processing steps contributed by each of the approaches: P-70
An

Integrated
KM Cycle:

Key Points:
•

There are a number of different approaches to the knowledge management cycle such as those by
McElroy, Wiig, Bukowitz and Willams, and Meyer and Zack.

•

By comparing and contrasting these and by validating them through experience gained to date with KM
practice, the major stages are identified as knowledge capture and creation, knowledge sharing and
dissemination, and knowledge acquisition and application.

•

The critical processes throughout the KM cycle assess the worth of content based on organizational goals
contextualize content to better match with a variety of users and continuously update with a focus on
updating, archiving as required, and modifying the scope of each knowledge object.

Chapter 03: Selected Knowledge Management Models
KM Models:
– Choo, Weick
– K. Wiig
– Beer and Bennet & Bennet
– Inukshuk Model

– Nonaka and Takeuchi
– Boisot
– EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Model)

Choo KM Model: Knowing Organization Framework (Choo, C.W. 1998) – 2nd edition 2006.
• Choo (1998) has described a model of knowledge management that stresses sense making, knowledge
creation and decision making.
o Each cycle has an outside stimulus or trigger.
• The Choo KM model focuses on How to select information elements that could feed into the
organizational actions.
• Organizational action results from the concentration and absorption of information from the external
environment into each successive cycle.
Choo’s KM Model:
1. Meaning is socially constructed as information is filtered through the sense making behavior.
2. Individuals create new knowledge about the external world through the transformation of their
individual knowledge into Shareable knowledge and information.
3. A threshold is reached at some specific point when the organization as a whole is prepared to act in a
rational manner and choose an alternative based upon the organizations goals, objectives & strategy.
4. Start the next cycle when the action chosen changes the external environment and impacts ongoing
decisions related to the original choice.
The Sense-Making Stage: Attempts to make sense of the information streaming in from the external
environment.
o
o

Priorities are identified and used to filter the information.
Common interpretation is constructed by individuals from the exchange and negotiation of information
fragments combined with their previous experiences.

Karl Weick: proposed theory of sense making to describe how chaos is transformed into sensible and orderly
processes in an organization through the shared interpretation of individuals.
•
•

A loosely coupled system: can be taken apart or revised without damaging the entire system.
Loosely coupled systems where individuals construct their own representation of reality by:
o Compare current with past events.
Weick Theory of Sense Making: Sense making process in an organization consists of four integrated processes:
1. Ecological change.
2. Enactment
3. Selection
4. Retention

1. Ecological Change: A change in the environment external to the organization disturbs the flow of
information to the participants.
• This triggers an ecological change in the organization.
• Organizational actors enact their environment by attempting to closely examine elements
of the environment.
2. Enactment phase, people try to construct, to rearrange, to single out, or to demolish specific elements of
content.
• Many of the objective features of their environment are made less random and more orderly through
the creation of their own constraints or rules.
• clarifies the content and issues to be used for the subsequent selection process.
3. & 4. Selection & Retention: phases where Individuals attempt to interpret the rationale for the observed
and enacted changes by making selections.
• The retention process furnishes the organization with an organizational memory of successful sense
making experiences.
• This memory Can be reused in the future to interpret new changes & stabilize individual
interpretations into an organizational view of events and actions
• This phase Reduces uncertainty and ambiguity associated with unclear, poorly defined information.
Knowledge Creating: is seen as the transformation of personal knowledge between individuals through dialog,
discourse, sharing, and storytelling.
• Directed by a knowledge vision of “AS IS” (current situation) and “TO BE” (future, desired state).
• Widens the spectrum of potential choices in decision making through new knowledge and new
competences.
• The result feeds the decision making process with innovative strategies that extend the organization’s
capability to make informed, rational decisions
• Choo draws upon the Nonaka & Takeuchi model for a theory of knowledge creation.
Decision Making: Is suited in rational decision-making models used to identify and evaluate alternatives by
processing the information and knowledge collected to date.
• Wide range of decision-making theories:
o Theory of games and economic behavior.
o Chaos theory, complexity theory, emergent theory.
o Bounded rationality theory.
o Garbage can be a theory in this.
Bounded Rationality Theory: First proposed by H. Simon a limited or constrained rationality organizational
decision making:
•

•
•

Starting with the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small
compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the
real world-or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.
When confronted with a highly complex world, the mind constructs a simple mental model of reality and
tries to work within that model.
Even though the model may have weaknesses, the individual tries to behave rationally within it.

•

•
•

Individuals can be bound in a decisional process by:
1. Limited in intelligence, skills, habits and responsiveness.
2. Availability of personal information and knowledge.
3. Values and norms which may be different from the org.
This theory has long been accepted in organizational and management sciences.
Bounded rationality is Characterized by individuals’ uses of:
1. Limited information analysis, evaluation, and processing.
2. Shortcuts and rules of thumb (heuristics).
3. “Satisficing” (good enough, 80/20 rule, not necessarily optimization).

Nonaka & Takeuchi KM Model: studied how Japanese companies were successful in achieving creativity and
innovation.
• found that it was far from a mechanistic processing of objective knowledge.
• Depending on highly subjective insights which best be described in the form of:
o Slogans, metaphors, symbols
• has its roots in a holistic model of knowledge creation and the management of “ serendipity”.
-Knowledge Creation Process: always begins with the individual. Brilliant researcher has an insight that leads
to a new patent.
• A Middle manager has intuition of market trends and becomes the catalyst for an important new product
concept.
• Shop floor workers draw on years of experience to come up with a process innovation that saves M$$$$.
• In each case, an individual’s personal, private knowledge is translated into valuable public organizational
knowledge.
• Making personal knowledge available to others in the company is at the core of this model of KM.
• This type of knowledge creation process takes place continuously and it occurs at all levels of the
organization.
• In many cases, the creation of knowledge occurs in an unexpected or unplanned way.
-Knowledge Conversion: Knowledge creation consists of a social process between individuals in which
knowledge transformation is not simply a unidirectional process, but it is interactive and spiral.
•

There are four modes of knowledge conversion:
1. From tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge: process of socialization.
2. From tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge: process of externalization.
3. From explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge: process of combination.
4. From explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge: process of internalization.

•

Socialization (tacit-to-tacit) consists of the sharing of knowledge in face-to-face, natural, and typically
social interactions.
o arriving at a shared understanding through the sharing of mental models.
o brainstorming to come up with new ideas, apprenticeship or mentoring interactions.
o Socialization is among the easiest forms of exchanging knowledge.
o The greatest advantage of socialization is also its greatest drawback due to rarely captured, noted, or
written down anywhere.
o Very effective creation and sharing.
o consists of sharing experiences through observation, imitation, and practice

•

Externalization (tacit-to-explicit) is a process that gives a visible form to tacit knowledge and converts it to
explicit knowledge.
o
o
o
o
o

It can be defined as “ a quintessential knowledge creation process in that tacit knowledge becomes
explicit, taking the shapes of metaphors, analogies, concepts, hypotheses, or models.
In this mode, able to articulate the knowledge, know-how and, in some cases, the know-why and the
care-why.
Knowledge that was previously tacit can somehow be: written down, recorded, drawn, or made
tangible or concrete.
intermediary is often needed at this stage due to difficulty transforming.
Once its tangible and permanent. It can be shared more easily with others.

A knowledge journalist is someone who can interview knowledgeable individuals in order to extract, model, and
synthesize in a different way (format, length, level of detail, etc.).
•

Combination (explicit-to-explicit), the process of recombining discrete pieces of explicit knowledge into a
new form.
o
o

•

Ex: synthesis in the form of a review report, a trend analysis, a brief executive summary, or a new
database to organize content.
Happens when concepts are sorted and systematized in a knowledge system.

Internalization (explicit-to-tacit) occurs through the diffusion and embedding of newly acquired behavior
and newly understood or revised mental models.
o
o
o
o

Internalization is very strongly linked to “ learning by doing”.
converts or integrates shared and/or individual experiences and knowledge into individual mental
models.
Once new knowledge has been internalized, it is then used by employees who broaden it, extend it,
and reframe it withing own existing tacit knowledge base.
They learn – they do their jobs differently now.

–

Apprentice may learn from the master, but the knowledge remains tacit & is not leveraged across the org.

–

Knowledge, experiences, best practices, lessons learned, and so on go through the conversion processes of
socialization, externalization, and combination.

–

The knowledge spiral is a continuous activity of knowledge flow, sharing, and conversion by individuals,
communities, and the organization itself.

Knowledge Spiral Knowledge creation is not a sequential process, but depends on a continuous and dynamic
interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge throughout the four quadrant.
•
•
•
•
•

First we learn something through socialization (e.g. being apprenticed to a master).
Next we translate this into a tangible format that can be more easily communicated to
others (externalization).
This knowledge is then standardized using templates, coding rules etc (new combination).
Finally, team members enrich their own tacit knowledge bases by adding new knowledge and
skills (internalization).
They then share this new knowledge tacitly (back to socialization and the spiral continues).

Public Information

The Wiig Model for Building and Using Knowledge approaches his KM Model with the below principle:
•
•

In order for knowledge to be useful and valuable organized it must be organized.
knowledge should be Organized differently depending on what knowledge will be used for.
o Ex: In our own mental models, we store knowledge as a semantic network.
o We choose the appropriate perspective depending on the cognitive task at hand.
• knowledge Organized in semantic network so that it can be accessed and retrieved using multiple paths.
Useful dimensions to consider in Wiig’s KM model:
1. Completeness: Addresses the question of how much relevant knowledge is available from a given source.
o Sources may be human minds or knowledge bases.
2. Connectedness: Refers to the well-understood and well-defined relations between the different knowledge
objects.
o There are very few knowledge items that are totally disconnected from the others.
o The more connected the knowledge base, the greater its value.
3. Congruency: A knowledge base is said to be congruent when all the facts, concepts, perspectives, values,
judgments, and associative and relational links between the knowledge objects are consistent.
o There should be no logical inconsistencies, no internal conflicts, and no misunderstandings.
4. Perspective and Purpose: refer to the phenomenon where we ‘know’ something, but we often know it
from a particular perspective or for a specific use in mind.
o We organize much of our knowledge using the of perspective and purpose.
o Ex: Just-in-time knowledge retrieval or just enough or “on-demand” knowledge.
Wiig’s KM model goes on to define different levels of internalization of knowledge: Degrees of
Internalization:
1. Novice: The lowest level, barely aware or Not aware of what the know or how it can be used.
2. Beginner: Knows that the knowledge exists and where to get it but cannot reason with it.
3. Competent: Knows about the knowledge, can use and reason with the knowledge given external
knowledge bases such as documents and people to help.
4. Expert: Knows the knowledge, holds the knowledge in memory, understands where it applies, reasons
with it without any outside help.
5. Master: Internalizes the knowledge fully, has a deep understanding with full integration into values,
judgments, and consequences of using that knowledge.
Wiig (1993) also defines Three major Forms of Knowledge:
1. Public Knowledge: Is Explicit, taught and routinely shared knowledge, generally available in the public
domain.
2. Shared Expertise: is proprietary knowledge assets that are exclusively held by knowledge workers and
shared in their work or embedded in technology, often communicated by specialized languages &
representations.
3. Personal Knowledge: is the least accessible but most complete form of knowledge, typically more tacit
than explicit knowledge.

Wiig Hierarchy of Knowledge:

Wiig defines four types of knowledge:
1. Factual: Facts, data, causal chains, measurement, reading.
2. Conceptual: systems, concepts, and perspectives e.g. track record, pull market.
3. Expectational: Judgments, hypotheses, heuristics.
4. Methodological: Reasoning, strategies, methods, techniques.
Wiig’s KM Matrix Knowledge Type:

Boisot KM Model: is based upon the key concept of an “information good” that differs from a physical asset.
proposes the following two key points:
•

The more easily data can be structured and converted into information, the more diffusible it becomes.

•

The less data that has been so structured requires a shared context for its diffusion, the more diffusible
it becomes.

Beer and Bennet & Bennet: Complex Adaptive System said to “self-organize ”:
•

The five key processes in the The intelligent complex adaptive systems (ICAS) KM model:

Understanding
Making decisions
•

Solving problems
Taking actions to achieve desired results.

Creating new ideas

To survive and successfully compete, an organization Based on 8 emergent characteristics:

Organizational intelligence.

Optimum complexity.

Knowledge centricity.

Permeable boundaries.

Flow.

Selectivity.

Shared purpose.
Multidimensionality

The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) KM Model:
•
•
•
•

Its looks at the way in which KM is used to attain the goals of an organization.
KM is positioned as an organizational enabler.
KM is used to achieve its goals and not KM-oriented goals.
One of the major reasons why KM fails occurs when KM is pursued for the sake.

The Inukshuk model: developed to help Canadian govern departments to better manage their knowledge.
• An Inukshuk is used to mark paths by First National people
• Developed by both reviewing existing major models and quantitative research.
• Uses the SECI (Nonaka and Takeuchi) model for the process piece and emphasizes the role played by
people.
Key Points
•

Knowledge management encompasses data, information, and knowledge (sometimes referred to
collectively as “ content ”), and it addresses both tacit and explicit forms of knowledge.

•

The von Krogh and Roos KM model take an organizational epistemology approach and emphasize that
knowledge resides both in the minds of individuals and in the relations they form with other individuals.

•

The Nonaka and Takeuchi KM model focuses on knowledge spirals that explain the transformation of tacit
knowledge into explicit knowledge and then back again as the basis for individual, group, and
organizational innovation and learning.

•

Choo and Weick adopt a sense-making approach to model knowledge management that focuses on how
information elements are fed into organizational actions through sense making, knowledge creation, and
decision making.

•

The Wiig KM model is based on the principle that in order for knowledge to be useful and valuable, it must
be organized through a form of semantic network that is connected, congruent, and complete and has
perspective and purpose.

•

The Boisot model introduces three key dimensions of knowledge beyond tacit and explicit; codifi ed,
abstract, and diffused knowledge.

•

Complex adaptive systems are particularly well suited to model KM as they view the organization much like
a living entity concerned with independent existence and survival.

•

The EFQM model introduces the major components of leadership, people, policy and strategy, and
partnerships and resources, in addition to processes, as being key enablers of organizational success.

•

The inukshuk model reprises the key enablers that form part of most KM models and assembles these
components in a highly visual and symbolic fashion to depict the key importance that people play in KM.
Canadian government leaders have applied this model.

Chapter 04: Knowledge Capture and Codification
Tacit Knowledge Capture & Explicit Knowledge Codification:
Ad Hoc Sessions
Learning History
Storytelling

Best Practice Capture
Roadmaps
Action Learning

Learn from Others, Guest Speakers
Interviewing to elicit tacit knowledge

•

artificial intelligence, more specifically, in the development of expert systems.
o An expert system incorporates know-how gathered from experts and is designed to perform as experts
do.
• “knowledge acquisition” was coined by the developers of such systems and referred to various
techniques such as
o

structured interviewing, protocol or talk aloud analysis, questionnaires, surveys, observation, and
simulation.

Tacit Knowledge Capture at the Individual and Group Levels:
• Knowledge acquisition from individuals or groups can be characterized as the transfer and
transformation of valuable expertise from a knowledge source (e.g., human expert, documents) to a
knowledge repository (e.g., corporate memory, intranet).
• The approach used to capture, describe, and subsequently code knowledge depends on the type of
knowledge:
o Explicit knowledge is already well described but we may need to abstract/summarize this content.
o Tacit knowledge may require significant up-front analysis and organization before it can be
suitably described and represented.
• The ways in which we can tackle tacit knowledge range from simple graphical representations to
sophisticated mathematical formulations.
Tacit knowledge is captured or elicited & Explicit knowledge is organized or coded.
• In the design and development of knowledge-based systems, or expert systems, knowledge engineers
interviewed subject matter experts, produced a conceptual model.
• The interactions with subject matter experts that were needed to render tacit knowledge explicit made
up the knowledge engineer’s toolkit.
• The major tasks carried out by knowledge engineers included:
1. Analyzing information and knowledge flow.
2. Working with experts to obtain information.
3. Designing and implementing an expert system.
• On the other side were the subject matter experts, and they had to be able to:
1. Explain important knowledge and know-how.
2. Be introspective and patient.
3. Have effective communication skills.
• Artificial intelligence researcher ( Parsaye 1988 ) outlined the following three major approaches to
knowledge acquisition from individuals and groups:
1. Interviewing experts.
2. Learning by being told.
3. Learning by observation.
All three approaches are applicable to tacit knowledge capture.

The following section presents a toolkit and guidelines on the strengths and drawbacks of each tool in order to
help select the best combination of techniques to use for a variety of different knowledge capture situations:
1. Interviewing Experts A number of techniques can be used to optimize the interviewing of experts. Two of
the more popular means include structured interviewing and stories.
o

Structured interviewing of subject matter experts is used technique to render key tacit knowledge of
an individual into more explicit forms. Two major types of questions are used in interviewing:
1. Open questions: tend to be broad and place few constraints on the expert, (not followed by choices,
designed to encourage free response.
2. Closed questions set limits on the type, level, and amount of information an expert will provide.
(Choice of alternatives is always given). can only be answered by yes or no
➢

o

These types of questions allow interviewers to observe the expert’s use of key vocabulary, concepts,
and frames of reference.

Stories are another excellent vehicle both for capturing and then subsequently coding tacit knowledge.
➢ organizational story is a detailed narrative of management actions, employee interactions, and
other intraorganizational events that are communicated informally within the organization.
➢ Conveying information in a story provides a rich context, remaining in the conscious memory
longer and creating more memory traces than information not in context.
➢ Can increase organizational learning, communicate common values and rule sets.

2. Learning by being told, the interviewee expresses and refines his or her knowledge, and the knowledge
manager clarifies and validates the knowledge artifact that renders this knowledge in explicit form.
o

This form of knowledge acquisition typically involves domain and task analysis, process tracing, and
protocol analysis and simulations.

3. Other Methods of Tacit Knowledge Capture: number of other techniques may be used to capture tacit
knowledge from individuals and from groups, including:
• Ad hoc sessions.

Rapidly mobilizing a community of practice or informal professional network to a
member’s call for help. (face-to-face or virtually)

• Road maps.

Are more formal in nature. They tend to be facilitated problem-solving meetings that are
scheduled, convened, and that follow an agenda.

• Learning histories.

Capturing tacit knowledge within group settings. represent a retrospective history
occurred in the past. The learning history process consists:

o Planning, Reflective interviews, Distillation, Writing, Validation, Dissemination
• Action learning.
• E-learning solution.

Based on the fact that people tend to learn by doing.

Capture of valuable procedural knowledge and documenting a history of all procedural
changes.
• Learning from others through External benchmarking, which involves learning about what the leaders are doing, either
through publications or site visits.
business guest speakers and
Benchmarking is a way of identifying better ways of doing business.
benchmarking against best
– Inviting guest speakers to an organization is another opportunity to bring a fresh
practices.
perspective or point of view.
– give a seminar or workshop and leave behind a set of reference materials.

Best Practice Capture: lessons learned can be said to be two different sides of the same coin: BPs look at
successes and LLs look at failures: They are both described in the same manner using metadata such as:
– Date prepared
– Point of contact: Name, organization, contact information
– Members who participated in the development of the best practice
– Problem statement and Background.
– Best Practice Description (Models, business rules, use graphics whenever possible)
Explicit Knowledge Codification: Knowledge codification is the next step of leveraging knowledge.
In this stage, knowledge is converted to tangible, explicit form such as document, can then be communicated
much more widely and with less cost.
•

There are, of course, costs and difficulties associated with knowledge codification. The first issue is that
of quality, which encompasses:
o

•

Accuracy, Readability/understandability, Accessibility, Currency and Authority/credibility.
To understand, maintain, and improve knowledge as part of corporate memory, knowledge must be
codified.

There are several techniques for codification of explicit knowledge such as:
1. Cognitive maps: are based on the concept mapping, which allow the organization directly draw a map
for knowledge management.
o It indicates the relations and concepts of knowledge in graphical form.
o A cognitive or knowledge map is a representation of the “ mental model ”of a person ’ s knowledge.
2. Decision trees: are basically the flow charts, with many alternative choices decisions at juncture points.
3. Knowledge Taxonomies: are hierarchy of concepts and definitions, which knowledge are graphically
represented in a way that reflects the organization concepts within a particular field of expertise or for
the organization.
o The high level of the concept position show the general or generic, and the low level show the specific
and details.
o Concepts are the building blocks of knowledge and expertise.
o A taxonomy is a classification scheme that:
➢ Groups related items together, often Names the types of relationships concepts have to one
another, Is developed through a consensus of key stakeholders and is often multifaceted to
represent the complexity of organizational knowledge.
Key Points:
• Firms need to adapt and adjust to some degree if they are to survive.
• Firms need to learn — the question is whether they do so in an ad hoc informal manner, or whether
there is deliberate intention to learn.
• Emergent knowledge acquisition ( Malhotra 2000 ) is spontaneous and unplanned. Because it is
haphazard, there is no guarantee that anything will be retained in the organization ’ s corporate
memory.
• Methodical, systematic, intentional knowledge acquisition is of greater strategic value to a firm.
• Knowledge bases must be populated and contents deployed in order to maximize efficiency and
effectiveness throughout the organization.

Chapter 05: Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice
What is a Community of Practice (CoP)?
•

Traditionally, we have shared knowledge through ‘word of mouth’ (e.g. master to apprentice).

•

While socializing comes ‘naturally’ to us, there are fewer opportunities in today’s much larger, much
more global companies.

Definition of “Community of Practice”: A group of people having common Identity, professional interests and
the undertake to share, participate and establish a fellowship.
•

also be defined as a group of people, along with their shared resources and dynamic relationships.

•

“The body of people in a learned occupation: “the news spread rapidly through the medical community”
o Common interests
o Agreement as to goals
• The word has been in the English language since the 14th century
o Comes from the Latin
o “The quality of holding something in common”
o A sense of common identity and characteristics
o More direct, more immediate and more significant relationships than informal organized societies
o Sharing of common goals, values, identities; participatory decision-making.
What is a virtual community? “Social aggregations that emerge from the Net when people carry on those
public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”
What is Practice?
• A customary way of operation or behavior
• Translating an idea into action
• The exercise of a profession
• Knowledge of how something is customarily done
What is a Community of Practice in the KM World?
• “A group of individuals informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”
(Snyder and Wenger).
• Peers in the execution of real work. What holds them together is a common sense of purpose
and a real need to know what each other knows” (John Seely Brown)
• “Focused on the more professional nature of work. It’s trying to find a better way of doing
work” (From the field….)
Putting the pieces together:
• The term “community” suggests that CoPs are not constrained by typical geographic, business unit or
functional boundaries but rather by common tasks, contexts and interests.
•

The word “practice” implies knowledge in action – how individuals actually perform their jobs on a dayto-day basis as opposed to more formal policies and procedures that reflect how work should be
performed.

Community of Practice A group of people: informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a
joint enterprise
Why aren’t they more prevalent?
• They have been around for centuries, but the term has just recently entered the business vernacular
• Only several dozen forward-thinking companies have taken the leap of seeding and nurturing them
• It is not easy to build and sustain communities of practice or to integrate them with the rest of the
organization. The organic, spontaneous, and informal nature of communities of practice makes
them resistant to supervision and interference.
Dimensions of Practice as the property of a community
• Joint enterprise: the glue that binds members together (a common/cummunity goal).
• Mutual engagement: how members become part of the community (commitment by all members).
• Shared repertoire: a virtual workspace for all members to be able to interact with one another.
Common characteristics of CoPs: Common Goal, Commitment, Virtual Workspace.
How are Communities of Practice Different?
Purpose
Membership
Community of
Exchange
Self select
Practice
knowledge
Work Group

Deliver product

All under manager

Project Team

Accomplish
specific task
Pass on business
information

Assigned or
selected
Friends & business
acquaintances

Informal
networks

The Value Added by Communities of Practice
– The help drive strategy
– They solve problems quickly
– They develop professional skills
Benefits of Communities of Practice
• For the organization
– Help drive strategy
– Diffuse best practices
– Build organizational memory
• For the community
– Develop professional skills
– Improve continuously
• For the individual

Glue
Passion,
identification with
group
Job & common goal
Project milestones
and goal
Mutual need

Duration
As long as the
interest lasts
Until restructured
Project completed
As long as reason
exists

– They start new lines of business
– They transfer best practices
– They help companies recruit and retain talent

– Solve problems quickly
– Cross-fertilize ideas, increase opportunities for innovation

– Develop a common language
– LEARN

– Help people do their jobs & save time
– Building a sense of community bonds within organization
– Helps people to keep up to date
– Provides challenges and opportunities to contribute

Why are CoPs important now?
• Knowledge increasingly recognized as a strategic intellectual asset.
• Cannot be left to chance – need to actively, systematically organize, and disseminate
knowledge.
• CoPs are a good way of doing this.
• CoPs need librarians, archivists, taxonomists….”knowledge stewards”.
A Paradox of Management
• Although communities of practice are fundamentally informal and self-organizing, they benefit from
cultivation.
• How to cultivate them:
o identify potential communities of practice that will enhance the company’s strategic capabilities.
o provide the infrastructure that will support them and enable them to apply their expertise
effectively.
o use nontraditional methods to assess their value.
Community Building Blocks: – Collective identity – Community type – Community roles and responsibilities Community membership – Collaborative work environment.
Community Types:
1. Helping Communities: Provide a forum for community members to help each other solve everyday work
problems.
2. Best Practice Communities: Develop and disseminate best practices, guidelines and procedures for
members’ use .
3. Knowledge Stewarding Communities: Organize, manage, and steward a body of
knowledge from which members can draw.
4. Innovation Communities: Create breakthrough ideas, knowledge & practices.
Community Roles and Responsibilities
• Functional sponsor: Believes in and promotes the value of knowledge sharing and community
membership.
• Core team: Use their knowledge of the discipline to judge what is important, groundbreaking and useful.
o Enrich information by summarizing, combining, contrasting and integrating information into the
knowledgebase.
o Establish a taxonomy for the knowledgebase
• Community Facilitator.
• Community Leader.
• Logistics Coordinator.
Directories of Experts Research shows that even in companies with well-developed KM infrastructures, people
still turn first to other people as they seek solutions to problems and knowledge.
• Knowledge flows are primarily through people

•

– Direct answer to question
– Metaknowledge
– Help in reformulating the problem…..
Communities are all about connections between people and these connections are often used to
develop corporate yellow pages or an expertise location system

Skill Mining: Like data mining. Purpose is to identify who within an enterprise has the expertise required to
help a knowledge worker with a specific issue:
o Manual – Knowledge Support Offices
o Automated – Abuzz, Autonomy, Dataware
• Tends to be better suited to ‘hard’ or technical skills.
Yellow Pages – Expert Network Example
Trading strategy

Intelligence analysis

Investment strategy

Economic forecasting

Portfolio theory

Technical analysis

Portfolio selection

Company analysis

Securities selection

Industry and competitive analysis

Mapping the Flow of Knowledge: Organizational networks and Sociograms
Social Network Analysis (SNA): social network analysis is the mapping and measuring of
relationships and flows.
• SNA is a diagnostic method for collecting and analyzing data about patterns of relationships among
people in groups.
• Can map and measure relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, and
other information/knowledge processing entities.
• Can identify patterns of interaction such as the average number of links between people in an
organization or community, the number of subgroups, information bottlenecks, knowledge brokers.
• Can help to improve knowledge flow, identify key brokers and hoarders.
– E.g., 6 degrees of separation
• Based on the results of the analysis, you may decide to:
1. Reorganize
2. Introduce new specific roles e.g., moderator to assist in knowledge transfer
3. Technologies to support expertise location, virtual meetings, as well as face-to-face meetings
4. Introduce a shared goal they can work towards or theme of interest for discussion
5. Self-awareness may be enough (“yikes – I am a knowledge black hole!)

Notes:
• Communities of practice should not be created in a vacuum.
a. In most cases, informal networks of people with the ability and the passion to further develop and
organization’s core competencies already exists.
b. The task is to identify such groups and help them come together as communities of practice.
•

A key task is defining a community’s domain. If members don’t feel personally connected to the group’s
area of expertise and interest once it has been defined, they won’t fully commit themselves to the work
of the community.

•

One way to strengthen communities of practice is to provide them with official sponsors and support
teams.
a. Such sponsors and teams do not design the communities or prescribe their activities or outcomes.
b.

Instead, they work with internal community leaders to provide resources and coordination.

•

The effects of community activities are often delayed, and the results generally appear in the work of
teams and business units, not in the communities themselves.

•

The solution to the conundrum of valuing communities of practice is to gather anectodal evidence
systematically.

Key Points:
o

The cost of not finding information is extremely high — both for individuals and for the organization.

o

It is not always about knowing what, but “ knowing who knows what, ”which can take the form of a
corporate yellow pages or expertise location system.

o

Learning is a primarily social activity.

o

Knowledge sharing occurs quite efficiently and effectively in communities of practice where members
share professional interests and goal.

o

For effective knowledge sharing to occur in CoPs, a number of key roles need to be in place, such as
knowledge sponsor, champion, facilitator, practice leader, KSO, membership manager, discussion
moderator, knowledge editor, librarian, archivist, usage analyst, and knowledge broker.

o

Virtual communities are the primary sources of social capital produced that is of value to the
organization.

o

Social network analysis can be used to visualize people and their connections in virtual communities.

o

Social presence and media richness are two dimensions that can be used to assess how well
technological channels such as e-mail, blogs, wikis, and so forth can accommodate the sharing of both
tacit and explicit knowledge.

o

Some of the key obstacles to knowledge sharing are notions such as knowledge is property,
knowledge is power, credibility of the content and the source, organizational culture, and the
presence of under nets.

Knowledge Management in Theory
and Practice
Lecture 4: Knowledge Capture and
Codification

Overview
 Knowledge Capture
◼

For tacit knowledge

 Knowledge Codification
For explicit knowledge
◼ Organizing knowledge in a knowledge taxonomy
◼

2

KM Cycle Step 1:Knowledge
Capture and Codification
Tacit Knowledge Capture & Codification
Ad Hoc Sessions,
◼ Roadmaps,
◼ Learning History
◼ Action Learning,
◼ Storytelling
◼ Learn from Others, Guest Speakers,
◼ Best Practice Capture
◼ Interviewing to elicit tacit knowledge
◼

3

Approaches to Knowledge
Capture and Codification
 How to describe and represent knowledge
Depending on the type of knowledge
◼ E.g. explicit knowledge is already well described but
may need to abstract/summarize it
◼ Tacit knowledge on the other hand may require
significant analysis and organization before it can be
suitably described and represented
◼

 Tools range from linguistic descriptions and
categories to mathematical formulations and
graphical representations
4

Tacit Knowledge Capture
Techniques
 Tacit Knowledge Capture
◼

Ad Hoc Sessions, Roadmap, Learning History,
Storytelling, Interviews, Action Learning, Learn from
Others, Guest Speakers, Relationship Building, Systems
Thinking

 Tacit Knowledge Codification
Proficiency Levels and Knowledge Profiles
◼ Abstract Concept Representation (mental models)
◼ Concept hierarchies (associative or semantic networks)
◼

5

Learning History
 Useful to capture tacit knowledge
 A retrospective history of significant events in an
organization’s recent past, described in the voices
of people who took part in them
 Researched through a series of reflective
interviews, transcribed in Q&A format
 Systematic review of successes and failures
“Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it”
George Santanya
6

Learning History Questions
 What was your role in the project/initiative?
 How would you judge its success?
 What would you do differently if you could?
 What recommendations do you have for other
people who might go through a similar process?
 What innovative things were done or could have
been done?

7

Learning History
Documentation
 Record and transcribe interviews
 Analyze data to identify like themes and subthemes as well as quotes to be used
 Document key themes and validate quotes
(e.g. make sure they are not anonymous nor
taken out of context)
 Summarize and publish
8

Learning History Template
Theme Title
Part 1
Overview of the Theme

_________________________________________________
Part 2
Commentary, conclusions and
potential questions to be asked
that relate to the adjacent quotes

quotes representing
key responses to
interview questions

__________________________________________________
Part 3
Brief summary of quotes, additional questions to provide more clarity to theme
9

Storytelling
 An organizational story is a detailed narrative of
management actions, employee interactions and
other intra-organizational events that are
communicated informally within the organization
 Conveying information in a story provides a rich
context, remaining in the conscious memory longer
and creating more memory traces than information
not in context
 Can increase organizational learning, communicate
common values and rule sets
10

What’s the Moral of the Story?
 Fables are short fictional folk tales used to
indirectly tell truths about life
They have a level of meaning beyond the surface
story
◼ They are an excellent example of what
organizational stories should be like – except
they would tell truths about life working in
company X…
◼

 Some examples:
11

The Chicken and the Jewel
 A chicken, scratching for food for herself and her chicks,
found a precious stone and exclaimed, “If your owner had
found you and not I, he would have taken you up and put
you in your first jewelry. But I have found you for no
purpose. I would rather have one kernel of corn rather than
all the jewels in the world.”

The ignorant despise what is precious
only because they cannot understand it
12

The Crow and the Pitcher
 A crow, perishing with thirst, saw a pitcher, and hoping to find water, he
flew to it with delight. When he reached it, he discovered to his grief
that it contained so little water he could not possibly get at it. He tried
everything he could think of to get to the water, but all his efforts were
in vain. At last, he collected as many stones as he could carry and
dropped them one by one into the pitcher, until the brought the water
within his reach and saved his life.

Necessity is the mother of invention

13

The Donkey and His Shadow
 A traveler hired a donkey to convey him to a distant place. The day
being intensely hot, and the sun shining in its strength, the traveler
stopped to rest, and sought shelter from the heat under the shadow of the
donkey. As this afforded protection for one, and as the traveler and the
owner of the donkey both claimed it, a violent dispute arose between
them as to which of them had the right to the shadow. The owner
maintained that he had let the donkey only, not his shadow. The traveler
asserted that he had, with the hire of the donkey, hired his shadow also.
The quarrel proceeded from words to blows, and while the men fought,
the donkey galloped off.

In quarrelling about the shadow,
we often lose the substance.
14

Try it out….
 Form groups of 3-5
 Try to write the moral of the story from one
of the three fables handed out
 Write these down and read out your results
when it is your group’s turn
NOTE TO INSTRUCTORS: provide students with paper or
electronic versions of any fable from Aesop – you can an use the
following – remove the morals from the slides you provide to students
15

The Man & His 2 Sweethearts
 A middle-aged man, whose hair had begun to turn gray,
courted two women at the same time. One of them was
young, and the other well advanced in years. The elder
woman, ashamed to be courted by a man younger than
herself, made a point, whenever her admirer visited her, to
pull out some portion of his black hairs. The younger, on
the contrary, not wishing to become the wife of an old man,
was equally zealous in removing every gray hair she could
find. Thus it came to pass that between them both he very
soon found that he had not a hair left on his head.
Those who seek to please everybody please nobody.
16

The Farmer & the Stork
 A farmer placed nets on his newly-sown land and caught a
number of cranes, which came to pick up his seed. With
them he trapped a stork that had fractured his leg in the net
and was earnestly beseeching the farmer to spare his life. “I
am no crane but a stork, a bird of excellent character – look
at my feathers – they are not the least like those of a crane!”
The farmer laughed aloud and said, “It may be all you say, I
only know this: I have taken you with these robbers, the
cranes, and you must die in their company.”
Birds of a feather flock together
17

The Oak & the Reeds
 A very large oak was uprooted by the wind and
thrown across a stream. It fell among some reeds,
which it thus addressed: “I wonder how you, who
are so light and weak, are not entirely crushed by
these strong winds.” They replied, “ You fight and
contend with the wind, and consequently, you are
destroyed; while we on the contrary bend before the
least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken
and escape.”
Stoop to conquer
18

The Hawk, the Falcon and the
Pigeons
 The pigeons, terrified by the appearance of a
falcon, called upon the hawk to defend them.
He at once consented. When they had
admitted him into their shelter, they found
that he made more havoc and slew a larger
number of them in one day than the falcon
could pounce upon in one whole year.
Avoid a remedy that is worse than the disease
19

The Fox and the Goat
 One day, a fox fell into a deep well and could find no means
of escape. A goat, overcome with thirst, came to the same
well and seeing the fox, inquired if the water was good. The
fox lavishly praised the water as excellent beyond measure
and encouraged the goat to descend. Thinking only of his
thirst the goat jumped in. The fox then informed him of the
difficulty they were both in and suggested they could escape
if he ran up the goat’s back to escape and then help the goat
out afterwards. The goat agreed. The fox got out and ran off
as fast as he could, leaving the goat behind in the well.
Look before you leap
20

Best Practice Capture
 Best practices and lessons learned can be said to be two
different sides of the same coin: BPs look at successes and
LLs look at failures
◼

They are both described in the same manner using metadata
such as:
⚫ Date prepared
⚫ Point of contact : Name, organization, contact information
⚫ Members who participated in the development of the best

practice
⚫ Problem statement
⚫ Background (Note any research that was conducted, summary of
significant findings, root cause identification)
⚫ Best Practice Description (Models, business rules, use graphics
whenever possible)
21

Lessons Learned & Best
Practices Capture
Situation
Observer

Date
What went wrong?
Lessons Learned
What went right?
Best practices
22

CIDA: Example of a Best
Practice in Forestry
Best Practice: Bolivia:
Emerging best practices for combating illegal activities in the forest sector

B2: Simplifying norms and reducing their number

The Bolivian government in reforming its timber concession policies decreed
that the concession fee would be $ 1 per hectare per year. This contrasted
sharply with previous complex norms that mandated timber concession fees
based on species types, volumes and quality of timber, which left much room to
interpretation, misclassification and disguised measurement errors. The new
rule is singular, simple and clear: a concession covering 100,000 hectares must
pay $ 100,000 in concession fees per year. There is no room for interpretation
or modification based on doubtful criteria. Monitoring compliance and
prosecution is extremely easy, as the evidence is transparent. While the
economic soundness of charging a uniform fee for timber concessions of
differing commercial value is questionable, the new norm has the undeniable
advantage of diminishing the incidence of corruption or arbitrariness in
determining concession fees
23

CIDA: Example of KM
Lessons Learned
Appoint a DG of KM and Change Management.
Use existing web and intranet infrastructures to support KM and
communities.
Most communities of practice already exist – increase their exposure,
help them get set up and give them the required resources.
Identify short, mid-term and long-term business (not KM) goals for each
community.

Biggest obstacle encountered was lack of senior management support.
Need to create awareness and shared understanding so employees
clearly see the benefits of KM
Supervisors can be good role models to help all CIDA realize that
knowledge sharing is expected of everyone.

24

Knowledge taxonomies
 Concepts are the building blocks of
knowledge and expertise.
Once key concepts have been identified and
captured, they can be arranged in a hierarchy – a
knowledge taxonomy
◼ graphically represent knowledge in a way that
reflects the logical organization of concepts
within a particular field of expertise or for the
organization at large
◼

25

Knowledge taxonomies – con’t
 A taxonomy is a classification scheme that
groups related items together
◼ names the types of relationships concepts have to
one another
◼ Is developed through a consensus of key
stakeholders
◼ Is often multifaceted to represent the complexity
of organizational knowledge
◼

26

Example – Facets

27

Tacit Knowledge Capture Activity
 Form pairs
 Take on role of knowledge journalist or subject matter
expert and then switch
 Topic suggestions: How did you decide on what to do for
your undergraduate degree? Whose advice did you seek?
How would you advise someone to make this decision?
 Write down 3-4 key interview questions you used
 Try to identify at least one best practice or lessons learned
from the experience using the BP/LL template handout

28

Interviews
 With subject matter experts, stakeholders,
process performers, customers – anybody
that can shed new light on a topic or issue
 Used to gather knowledge for the community
and its knowledge base
Gather good stories!!
29

Interview Plan
 Initial contact (phone, email, face-to-face)
 Explanation of interview purpose, format,
duration, confidentiality of information
 Establishing credibility and rapport
 Ice-breaking
 Professionalism (boundaries)

30

Types of Interview Questions
 Closed questions
Can be answered with a yes or no
◼ Used to validate (sometimes to “provoke” a
reaction)
◼

 Open questions
Require explanations as answers
◼ Used to elicit knowledge
◼

31

Group Activity: How to interview
 Form pairs
 Take on the role of knowledge manager or
subject matter expert and then switch
◼

What are some of your best practices or lessons
you learned (easy or hard way) on writing a good
resume when seeking a job?

 Write down some questions you asked
 What was easy about interviewing/being
interviewed? What was hard?
32

Interview Questions
Interviewer #1

Interviewer #2

Q1:

Q1:

Q2:

Q2:

Q3:

Q3:

33

Summary: Tacit Knowledge
Capture and Codification
 Tacit Knowledge Capture Techniques
Ad Hoc Sessions, Roadmap, Learning History
◼ Storytelling, Interviews, Action Learning,
◼ Learn from Others, Guest Speakers,
◼ Best Practice capture
◼

 Tacit Knowledge Codification Techniques
Mental models
◼ Concept hierarchies, semantic networks
◼ Best practices, lessons learned
◼

34

Next week:
 Knowledge Sharing and Communities of
Practice

35

Purchase answer to see full
attachment