Phil Vitkus, 08-Dec-06 @ 17:12PM

KC, KA, KE, others from the acted upon's point of view

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Hi,

A bit new am I to this topic, this community. I appreciate this conversation about the basic terminology. It's helping me understand a number of the tasks I need to have in place for a work plan for a proposed standalone content capturing and storing, and training and aiding development system.

Interesting to me so far in this conversation is that the KM terminology takes the actor's (e.g., knowledge manager's) point of view, and not the acted upon. With the proposal I am putting together I am electing to avoid some of the organizational characteristics that need to be in place for knowledge sharing to occur on a widescale basis in the organization, and to focus soley on the computer aspects. But in designing the content capturing or content verification interface, it seems to make a lot of sense to consider the knowledge transfer process from the content expert/job task performer's point of view. And in doing so, perhaps a few other terms about the knowledge transfer process would be in order.

Clearly, knowledge transfer in a postive work environment can be truly knowledge sharing. In one context I've seen (remember, I am a bit of a newbie), such an environment is called a learning organization.

And certainly other types of organizational cultures would support knowledge sharing. For example, an organization that commonly rotates staff in and out of various positions, or in and out of the field. This can of course be military, but need not be. It could be a sales organization in a large corporation, known for bringing in stellar account managers in from the field to the corporate office, giving them a few positions to become familiar with operations and the sales execs, and sending them out as sales managers.

In such a 'rotating staff' organization, everyone would know that they are only temporarily in one position, and can feel safe about transferring their wisdom (tacit knowledge) to others.

Another organization that would support knowledge sharing is one that highly, highly emphasizes training others to replace you before you move up the hierarchy. One of the global quick-service restaurant chains headquartered in the U.S., perhaps in Oak Brook, Illinois, requires all restaurant staff to train three replacements before moving up the restaurant food chain (horrible pun intended).

I suspect the greater challenges would be in a non-learning organization, or a non-rotating staff organization, or a non-training organization. In which case it's not knowledge sharing.

So instead of knowledge capture, elicitation, or acquisition, it's more like the following.

Job Security Stealing (remember, within the organization, and from the content expert's point of view)

Content Expert Wrestling

Knowledge Dredging

Knowledge Wrestling

...or some such threatening-to-the-content expert/job task performer process.

Clearly none of these terms point to a technical, content structuring or transforming activity. But I suspect it's a point of view that needs to be in place for the human to human interactions and the computer to human interface in a less than warm organizational environment.

Too newbie a thought?

Denham Grey, 14-Nov-05 @ 21:53PM

Knowledge harvesting?

Now knowledge harvesting is another oft heard term in this series.

There is something about knowledge harvesting that sets my teeth on edge. Perhaps it is memory of mining heuristics and insights during my expert system days, discovering just how brittle knowing is, how difficult it is to pin-down or specify context and produce real meaning, perhaps it is the painful experience of having captured what I thought was a real k. gem and coming to appreciate that without dialog, community and social vetting, all I had was information?.

Here are further links and thoughts:

http://kmwiki.wikispaces.com/Knowledge+harvesting

Denham Grey, 13-Nov-05 @ 20:22PM

Interesting distinctions

Knowledge elicitation
Making implicit (not tacit) knowledge explicit - helping experts recall, test and refine their rules-of-thumb, heuristics and working practices. This can take the form of interviews, simulation, card sorting, concept mapping

Knowledge codification
Recording knowledge using some representation or device e.g. rules, stories, digital recorder or podcasts.

Knowledge acquisition
Gathering intelligence, finding & vetting sources, combining insights, determining relevance. This can be done by community inquiry, internet search or spider technology, remote sensing cam corder....

Knowledge capture
A generic term that covers part or all of the previous three distinctions. To capture quality knowledge, you need to: determine best sources, elicit heuristics, represent and store the results and test their validity.

Lakshman Pillai, 13-Nov-05 @ 08:03AM

KE->KC->KA

I very much agree that each of these terminologies have different meaning.

Knowledge Elicitation (KE) is the process of bringing out the knowledge from people's mind (both conscious and sub-conscious) through expression, story telling or the articulation of what we know. Expressing what is in our sub-conscious mind is very difficult but possible.

Knowledge Capture (KC) is the process of recording our knowledge. It is also called "knowledge representation". It includes both structured and unstructured knowledge.

Knowledge Acquisition is the process of learning and understanding of various piece of knowledge and taking action. It is also called internalizing or gaining knowledge.

KE is tacit->explicit
KA is explicit->tacit or tacit->tacit
KC is the recording of explicit knowledge.

We can also argue that KC includes the process of recording knowledge directly in our mind in the form of mind map, concept Maps or just unconnected data in our mind. But, capturing (or retaining) knowledge or information in our mind “without knowing” will not help us recall. This way of “temporarily” keeping in our short-term memory is as bad as not recorded in mind. Hence it would be better to call recording or retention of tacit knowledge as “knowledge acquisition” or learning.

I feel that KE is the opposite of KA but not the subset of KA. KA->KE->KC->KA and KA->KE->KA are the lifecycles of knowledge sharing. In the KM implementation, KE is the tricky part. It can be either extremely easy or almost impossible based on the ability, culture and the trust level of the people involved.