CHAPTER 5: TECHNIQUE AND TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT FOR
5.3 Techniques to support knowledge management
The extent to which knowledge transformation within and between tacit and explicit forms can be supported by techniques and technologies is reviewed. The strongest contribution to current solutions is made by techniques and technologies that deal largely with explicit knowledge.
Contributions to the formation and communication of tacit knowledge, and support for making it explicit are currently weaker than explicit contributions, although some encouraging developments have been highlighted, such as text-based chat and
unrestricted bulletin boards.
In some cases, direct contact cannot be replaced in order to transfer knowledge.
Technology can never substitute for the interactivity, communication and learning that are inherent in personal dialogue. Developments in worldwide communication
systems (such as e-mail) can speed up information and knowledge transfer, but in developing and retaining expertise it cannot fully replace face-to-face contacts. Three elements of knowledge management, namely people, business processes and suitable techniques and technology, need to be in place to trigger the knowledge transfer process.
In the following section of this chapter the techniques that support the processes of Table 5.1 are described in more detail and illustrated with examples drawn from current research articles.
goal of knowledge management to help people work better together, using and managing increasing amounts of information and knowledge.
In the knowledge management literature a distinction is made between knowledge transfer that occurs naturally or informally, and that which takes place in more formalised routines. Davenport and Prusak (1998: 89), when reviewing knowledge management programs in practice, highlight the difference between the more
formalised transfer mechanisms such as documents, databases, intranets and informal exchanges which are more casual events that usually take place face-to-face, for example in conversation. These unstructured exchanges are vital to an organisation’s success and one of the essential elements of knowledge management is to develop special techniques to encourage such spontaneous exchanges. Various techniques exist, of which only a few are discussed.
5.3.1 Talk rooms and knowledge fairs
Evidence of such efforts can be seen in Japan, where “talk rooms” are deliberately established in which people meet to converse when and how they wish as well as in
“knowledge fairs”, notably at Ernst and Young, which are deliberately unstructured events where employees are encouraged to share their knowledge. Knowledge is transferred through the process of externalisation by converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (Nonaka & Konno, 1998: 42).
5.3.2 Mentoring
The word mentor can be traced back to Homer’s myth of Odysseus. The King left his son Telemachus in the care of a mentor, who guided and taught the youth for ten years while his father was away fighting the Trojans. A mentor, therefore, has always been considered as one who draws upon a deep knowledge base to teach and guide. The recognition of mentoring as an important transfer mechanism for knowledge within organisations has grown significantly in the past couple of decades. However, the mentoring literature focuses primarily on how to structure the mentor-protégé
relationship (Noe, 1988: 65), on the desired behaviour of mentors (Benabou, 1999: 7) and on identifying mentoring functions (Kram, 1995: 110). In the three articles reviewed, none tested the relationship between mentoring and an increase in
organisational knowledge. A number of studies have found that individuals who are mentored perform better and are promoted more rapidly (Benabou, 1999: 11), presumably because they have learned and absorbed knowledge from their mentors.
Mentors serve as informal teachers, and knowledge is being transferred by means of internalisation and externalisation processes. In recent years, the concept of mentoring has been extended to include peer-to-peer help and protégé-to-mentor learning.
5.3.3 Stories and storytelling
Swap and Leonard (2001: 103) define an organisational story as “A detailed narrative of past management actions, employee interactions, or other intra- or extra-
organisational events that are communicated informally within the organisation.”
Normally these stories will originate from within the organisation and will therefore reflect organisational norms, values and culture. Mentors from outside the company may use stories from their past experiences and norms and values common to many organisations.
Because of the rich contextual details encoded in stories, they are ideal carriers of tacit dimensions of knowledge which are transferred informally through processes of socialisation (acquiring tacit knowledge through sharing experiences) and
internalisation (embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge). However, stories do not lend themselves equally well to transferring different kinds of
knowledge. As a strategy for building core capabilities within an organisation, the use of stories to transfer critical skills and managerial systems would probably be
misguided. Critical skills, including deep knowledge of a content domain, will be very difficult to transfer via stories. For such concrete forms of knowledge, people will rely on mentoring or training programmes (Boyce, 1996: 5).
Story telling helps people to discover new knowledge and help employees who share the story to develop a common outlook or shared mental model.
5.3.4 Breakfast chatting
Seely and DuGuid (2000: 3) found that a quick breakfast could be worth hours of training. Employees talk about work and talk about it continually, while eating and gossiping. According to Seely and DuGuid, employees pose questions, raise
problems, offer solutions, construct answers, laugh at mistakes and discuss changes in their work and customer relations.
Both directly and indirectly, they keep one another up to date about what they know, what they have learned and what they were doing. The group breakfast demonstrates that a job that seems highly independent on paper is in reality remarkably social.
Employees get together not only during official meetings but also in their own time for breakfast, lunch, coffee or the end of the day – and sometimes at all those times.
This sociability is not just a retreat from the loneliness of an isolating job but the constant chatting is similar to the background updating that goes on all the time in any ordinary work situation.
In the course of socialising employees develop a collective pool of practical knowledge that any one of them can draw upon. Each employee contributes to the pool, drawing from his or her own particular strengths, which the others recognise and rely on. Collectively the local groups constitute a community of practice.
5.3.5 Communities of practice
According to Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002: 2) informal groups known as communities of practice is the latest technique for getting employees to share what they know. New members bring in new interests and may pull the focus of the community in different directions. Changes in the organisation influence the relative importance of the community and place new demands on it. For example, an
information technology community that was only marginally important to an
organisation suddenly became critical as the organisation discovered the potential of a few e-business pilots.
Thomas, Kellogg and Erickson argue (2001: 867) that an effective community of practice is built on the collective experience of community members. Only an insider can appreciate the issues of the domain, the knowledge that is important to share, who the real players are and their relationships.
Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) found that employees participate in
communities for different reasons. Three main levels of community participation are seen. The first is a small core group of people who actively participate in discussions.
As the community matures, this core group takes on much of the community’s leadership. At the next level outside this core is the active group. These members attend meetings regularly and participate occasionally in the community forums, but without the regularity or intensity of the core group.
A large number of community members are peripheral and rarely participate. Instead, they keep to the sidelines, watching the interaction of the core and active members. In a traditional meeting or team, managers would discourage such half-hearted
involvement, but according to Thomas, Kellogg and Erickson (2001) these peripheral activities are an essential dimension of communities of practice. According to the authors, the people on the sidelines often are not as passive as they seem; they gain their own insights and knowledge from the discussions and put them to good use.
Finally, outside those three main levels, are people surrounding the community who are not members but have an interest in the community, including customers, suppliers and “intellectual neighbours”.
The key to good community participation, and a healthy degree of movement between levels, is to design community activities that allow participants at all levels to feel like full members.
According to Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) participation must never be forced, but opportunities must be in place for private interaction through discussion rooms, on the community’s website, at a community event or in a face-to-face conversation.
5.3.6 Suggestion schemes
According to Dunn and Lloyd (cited in Cooley, Helbling and Fuller, 2001: 47) a suggestion scheme is “a formal mechanism, which encourages employees to contribute constructive ideas for improving their organisation”.
Suggestion schemes draw out suggestions from employees, classify them (for example according to Nonaka and Takeuchi’s four tacit and explicit forms of knowledge) and send them to “experts” to evaluate them.
Suggestions can then either be adopted or rejected by the experts. Suggestion schemes rely on employees to make their tacit knowledge explicit by posting suggestions in a
“suggestion box” or by entering it in a database. The distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge, and the role of knowledge within organisations is of obvious
significance to suggestion schemes.
Cooley, Helbling and Fuller (2001: 53) argue that suggestion schemes as they are currently used, can play a distinctive role in a knowledge management strategy because they are often based on either an intimate knowledge of detailed procedures, or of the reactions of customers to an organisation’s behaviour.
5.3.7 Face-to-face conversations
Turning to a technique that is so common as to go unnoticed, namely conversation concludes the review of practical techniques for supporting a socially informed approach to knowledge management.
Conversation is viewed as essential. It is used as a medium for decision-making and it is through conversation that we create, develop, validate and share knowledge.
According to Clark (1996: 10-15) the vital characteristic of conversation is that it is a deeply interactive intellectual process as well as a superb method for eliciting,
unpacking, articulating, and applying and recontextualising knowledge.
Externalisation, the process of converting tacit knowledge into explicit concepts can be triggered by conversation.
During face-to-face conversations people share the same physical environment, are visible to each other, communicating by speaking and the receiver receives the message at roughly the same time as when the sender produces it. The result is that knowledge is immediately available to everybody involved in the conversation.
Apart from the techniques that have been discussed, different technology
considerations also play an important role in supporting knowledge management processes and activities.