Approaches to Knowledge Management Practice

mute acquaintance versus lucid association Approaches to Knowlight-emitting diodege Management Practice by Ron Sanchez Professor of Management, Copenhagen Business naturalise and Linden Visiting Professor for Industrial Analysis, Lund University Contact in pull ination surgical incision of Industrial Economics and Strategy Solbjergvej 3 3rd floor DK 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark netmail emailprotected dk Abstract This publisher explains dickens extreme border unmatcheds to familiarity watchfulness.The understood cognition overture emphasizes understanding the courses of experience that singulars in an plaque take hold, moving deal to canalise experience inwardly an scheme, and managing reveal individualistics as fellowship creators and carriers. By contrast, the unadorned thrust intercourseledge go about emphasizes demonstratees for articulating familiarity held by individuals, the contrive of organisational go aboutes for creating parvenue acquai ntance, and the ontogenesis of systems (including information systems) to disseminate articu recentd noesis at heart an organic law.The relative advantages and disadvantages of more or less(prenominal) figure outiones to fellowship wariness argon iterated. A discount of dumb and fellowship perplexity accessiones is recommended to fix a hybrid anatomy for the acquaintance management adopts in a given memorial tablet. JEL code low 1 Introduction Managers concerned with implementing association management in their physical compositions instantly face a number of challenges in developing go bad methods for this dormant emerging atomic number 18a of management praxis.Both the growing literature on familiarity management and the advice offered by various cognition management consultants, however, come out to prop wiznt forms of companionship management send that very much appear incomplete, in compri unwrapnt, and yet contradictory. This paper sugges ts that the actual lack of coherence in the diverse recommendations for association management utilization results from the fact that the development of both theory and practice in this emerging field is being driven by 2 prerequisitely various cominges to pick uping and managing intimacy in make-ups.These two approaches ar characterized here as the silent cognition approach and the definitive noesis approach. This paper commencement clarifies how these two fundamental approaches differ in both their philosophical set forth and derived recommendations for practice, and it summarizes the main strengths and weaknesses of separately of the two approaches in practice. We indeed suggest that sound noesis management practice requires a creative synthesis of the two approaches that enables the strengths of one approach to explode the inherent limitations of the opposite approach, and vice versa. . implicit familiarity versus Explicit Knowledge Approaches Even a ca sual surveil of the umpteen articles and consulting recommendations on friendship management practice immediately in short reveals a plethora of recommended processes and techniques. Unfortunately especially for the many an opposite(prenominal) managers looking to researchers and consultants for insights to rent development of sound noesis 2 management practices many of these recommendations seem unconnected to severally other, and in the worst cases many seem to be quite at odds with severally other.C digest analysis of these recommendations, however, ordinarily reveals that the many ideas for practice being advanced today backside be sorted into one of two fundamentally different views of companionship itself and of the resulting possibilities for managing familiarity in systems. These two views ar characterized here as the dumb cognition approach and the overt companionship approach. Let us consider the staple expound and the possibilities for noesis man agement practice implied by each of these two views (see tabulate 1 for a summary of the differences in the two approaches).The understood Knowledge Approach The salient characteristic of the unsounded association approach is the basic sentiment that companionship is essentially individualised in nature and is consequently difficult to extract from the heads of individuals. In effect, this approach to fellowship management assumes, often implicitly, that the association in and available to an disposal entrust largely consist of unsounded companionship that remains in the heads of individuals in the organic law. 1Working from the inaugurate that cognition is inherently personal and go away largely remain implicit, the tacit cognition approach typically holds that the dissemination of companionship in an constitution croupe scoop up be accomplished by the transfer of community as acquaintance carriers from one kick d birthstairs of an constitution to another. Further, this view believes that learning in an judicature occurs when individuals come together under circumstances that encourage them to sh be their ideas and (hopefully) to develop vernal insights together that will lead to the creation of spic-and-span knowledge.Recommendations for knowledge management practice proffered by researchers and consultants working within the tacit knowledge approach naturally tend to focus 1 both(prenominal) writers and consultants have even gone so far as to palisade that all knowledge is tacit in nature. The irony in onerous to communicate to others the knowledge that all knowledge is tacit, however, should be obvious. 3 on managing hatful as individual carriers of knowledge.To make wider spend of the tacit knowledge of individuals, managers are urged to identify the knowledge possessed by various individuals in an organization and whence to arrange the kinds of interactions between knowledgeable individuals that will economic aid the organization perform its current tasks, transfer knowledge from one bump of the organization to another, and/or create modern knowledge that whitethorn be useful to the organization. Let us consider some examples 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 yet knew what we know, we could conquer the world. As firms go forth larger, to a great extent knowledge intensive, and to a greater extent(prenominal) world(prenominal)ly dispersed, the need for their managers to know what we know is becoming acute.Thus, a common initiative within the tacit knowledge approach is usually some effort to break understanding of who knows al more or less(prenominal) what in an organi zation an effort that is sometimes described as an effort to create know who forms of knowledge. 2 An example of much(prenominal) an effort is the creation within Philips, the global electronics party, of a yellow pages listing experts with different kinds of knowledge within Philips many business units.Today on the Philips intranet one pot type in the strike words for a specific knowledge domain say, for example, knowledge about the role of optical pickup units for CD/DVD players and recorders and the yellow pages will retrieve a listing of the mess within Philips worldwide who have stated that they have such(prenominal) knowledge. Contact information is to a fault provided for each person listed, so that anyone in Philips who wants to know more about that kind of knowledge goat get in touch with listed individuals. 2Know-how, know-why, and know-what forms of knowledge preserveister as wellspring be described (see Sanchez 1997). 4 An example of the tacit knowledge app roach to transferring knowledge within a global organization is provided by Toyota. When Toyota wants to transfer knowledge of its end reaping system to new employees in a new fable manufacturing plant, such as the factory recently undefendable in Valenciennes, France, Toyota typically selects a core aggroup of two to common chord hundred new employees and sends them for several months training and work on the fiction bound in one of Toyotas existing factories.After several months of crowd outvass the production system and working alongside experienced Toyota throng bloodline workers, the new workers are sent back to the new factory site. These repatriated workers are accompanied by one or two hundred long-term, super experienced Toyota workers, who will then work alongside all the new employees in the new factory to assure that knowledge of Toyotas fine tuned production process is fully implanted in the new factory. Toyotas use of Quality Circles also provides an exam ple of the tacit knowledge approach to creating new knowledge.At the end of each work hebdomad, groups of Toyota production workers spend one to two hours analyzing the performance of their part of the production system to identify existent or potential problems in quality or productivity. Each group proposes countermeasures to correct identified problems, 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, devise steps to test new ideas for improvement, and assess the results of their tests.This knowledge management practice, which is repeated weekly as an integral part of the Toyota production system, progressively identifies, eliminates, and even prevents errors. As improvements developed by Quality Circles are accumulated over many years, Toyotas production system has become one of the gamyest qu ality 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 unadorned knowledge approach holds that knowledge is something that bum be explained y individuals even though some effort and even some forms of financial aid whitethorn sometimes be compulsory to financial aid individuals articulate what they know. As a result, the declared knowledge approach assumes that the useful knowledge of individuals in an organization can be articulated and make intelligible. Working from the premise that authoritative forms of knowledge can be made straightforward, the hard-core knowledge approach also believes that formal organizational processes can be apply to help individuals articulate 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 by documents, dra wings, warning operating procedures, manual of armss of topper practice, and the uniform. Information systems are usually seen as playing a important 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 made explicit and managed explicitly is the belief that new knowledge can be created through a structured, managed, scientific learning process.Experiments and other forms of structured learning processes can be inclinationed to remedy important knowledge deficiencies, or market transactions or strategic partnering whitethorn be use 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 stick uping organizational processes for ge nerating, articulating, categorizing, and self-opinionatedally 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 preserve this leadership position, Motorola introduced new multiplications of pager externalizes every 12-15 months. Each new pager generation was designed to offer more advanced features and options for customization than the preceding generation. In step-up, a new factory with higher-speed, more flexible 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 squads of product and factory designers to design each new generation of pager and factory. At the beginning of their project, each new team of designers stock a manual of design methods and techniques from the team that had developed the previous generati on of pager and factory.The new team would then have three deliverables at the end of their project (i) an improved and more configurable near-generation pager design, (ii) the design of a more efficient and flexible assembly line for the factory that would produce the new pager, and (iii) an improved design manual that merged the design knowledge provided to the team in the manual it received plus the new and improved design methods that the team had developed to oppose 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 guidance, Motorola sought to make explicit and capture the knowledge developed by its engineers during each project and to magisterialally 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 i ts production system, Toyota also follows a highly victimization modular product architectures to create increasingly configurable product designs, Motorola was able to outgrowth the number of customizable product variations it could offer from a few thousand variations in the late 1980s to more than 120 million variations by the late 1990s. 7 theatre of operationsd explicit knowledge management practice of documenting the tasks that each team of workers and each individual worker is asked to perform on its assembly lines.These documents provide a circumstantial 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 own 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 suggesti ons are evaluated by Toyotas production engineers and then formally incorporated in revised task description documents.In addition to developing percipient 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 Corporation, for example, several platform teams of 300-600 development engineers have responsibility for creating the next generation platforms4 on which Chryslers future automobiles will be animal footd.Each platform team is free to actively research and evaluate alternative 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 so lutions 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 includes a system of standard grammatical constituent types and standardized interfaces between member types that enable plugging and playing different component 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 use 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 crea te 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 most 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 i mplicit Knowledge Approach One of the main advantages of the tacit knowledge approach is that it is a relatively unaccented 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 assign individuals to key tasks or to compose teams with appropriate sets of knowledge to carry out a project, to improve performance in current processes, or to establish to create new knowledge in the organization. As Philips did with its intranet householdd yellow pages, managers whitethorn 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 whitethorn also lead to improvements in employee satisfaction and want when an organization officially recognizes and makes visible in t he organization the kinds of knowledge that individual workers claim to have. In addition, the tacit knowledge approach is likely to reduce some of the practical and pauperizational difficulties that whitethorn be encountered in seek to secure the cooperation of individuals in making 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 gamble that knowledge will be leaked from an organization, so that leaving knowledge in tacit form also helps to protect a firms copyrighted knowledge from diffusing to competing organizations. (The potential disadvantages of leaving knowledge in tacit form are summarized below. ) Although relatively easy 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 i n 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 frequent 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 organization, then the only way to move knowledge within the organization is to move people. Moving people is often costly and time-consuming and may be resisted by individuals who idolise disruptions of their careers or family life. Even when knowledgeable individuals are willing to be move, 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 speed of the organization in transferring an individuals knowledge.Moreover, sometimes transferred ind ividuals may not be accepted by other groups in the organization or may otherwise fail to establish good rapport with other individuals, and the desire 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 worst case is recruited by competitors. Advantages and Disadvantages of the Explicit Knowledge Approach In general, the advantages and disadvantages of the explicit knowledge approach constitute 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 come-at-able through use of information systems to quickly 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 carefully codify and more powerfully leveraged than tacit knowledge assets. To codify some forms of knowledge is to cat egorize and order the knowledge so that important interrelationships between different kinds of knowledge within the firm can 5Of course, under patent, copyright, or trade silence laws, an organization may have intellectual property rights 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 identified. For example, forms of knowledge that are related by sharing a similar theoretical or practical knowledge base can be identified, as can forms of (complementary) knowledge that are relate 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, tested 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 knowledge 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 key individuals become unobtainable 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 arise primarily in assuring adequate articulation, evaluation, application, and protection of knowledge assets.Individuals may not have sufficient skill or motivation to articulate their useful knowledge. Individuals vary greatly in the precision with which they can state their ideas, and some individuals pe rhaps 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 resistance is usually a belief that an individuals job security or position of function 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 apocalypse of an individuals important knowledge would be followed by firing off 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 ma ny organizations, especially with regard to key knowledge workers.New employment norms may have to be define and institutionalized that both seek and return 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 populated by knowledge workers with advanced education and training in formally communicating their ideas, the less difficult the articulation of explicit knowledge within the organization should be. Further, not all knowledge of individuals will inevitably be worth more to the organization than it may cost the organization to help or to reward individuals who fork out to articulate their knowledge. Essentially, managers must try to understand when the fringy cost of articulating knowledge is becoming greater than the marginal benefit of 14 Organizations must also meet the challenge of adequately evaluating knowledg e 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 telling 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 evaluating the individual knowledge that has been made explicit and for resolving impertinent knowledge beliefs of individuals.Organizations with experience in managing this process have found that the people withdrawd in such evaluation processes must be see within the organization for their expertise, objectivity, and impartiality. In most organizations, the time of such people is usually both very valuable and in short supply, and involving such people in evaluating explicit knowledge in many forms may impose a significant cost on the organiza tion (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 articulated in one part of the organization is not rejected or ignored by other parts of the organization simply because they choose to stay close to their own familiar knowledge base i. e. , because of an intra-organizational not invented here syndrome. One approach to managing this concern is the execution of organizational opera hat knowledge and best practice practices.In this practice, the citizens perpetration 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 extracting the next bit of knowledge from an individual. Since no one currently knows just now 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 are then required either 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 bring out 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 building a high degree of organizational trust that the process of the expert committee for deciding best knowledge and best practice is objective, impartial, 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 all-embracing 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 an d practices, and one might naturally be led to ask, Which approach is right? As with most alternative approaches to management issues, however, the consequence 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 disadvantages 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 dispersion of its knowledge workers, the resources available to the organization to range 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. Such practices are relatively inexpensive, devalued to implement, and less challenging organizationally than full-blown explicit knowledge management practices, and they often create surprising organizational interest in and cipher 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 systema tic 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 involved 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 effective 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 spread over their initial tacit knowledge practices. 18 References Sanchez, Ron (2004). Creating modular platforms for strategic flexibility, formulate 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 exertion 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 technologies) 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 know ledge assets) may be moved instantaneously anytime anywhere by information technologies. Employees may respond well to recognition of the (claimed) knowledge. Likely 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. Making 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