Posted by Martyn R Jones on September 02, 2001 at 20:34:30:

In Reply to: Key KM issues posted by Denham on August 30, 2001 at 13:07:16:

Hello Denham,

Greetings from Paris! and many, many thanks for your reply. I really had to think long and hard about your posting, and I still only managed to come up with the following:

As our good friend Reilly Atkinson might have put it “If you don’t know the answer to the questions who does”, but anyway, here is a reply, of sorts:

First of all, in order to limit the scope and reach of my introductory understanding of KM I would like to set my sights solely on KM in Business (and maybe Government) – broad enough as it is for me to conceptualize.

Tacit Knowledge:

I have quite a curious old time of it with the term Tacit Knowledge, and I can imagine that many of the problems being discussed with regards to this topic and its issue are the very same things – give or take a new word or label here or there - that were discussed in relation to tacit knowledge and knowledge elicitation back in the early to mid 1980s. In many ways, and I may be wrong, we have seemed to have come full circle, what with discussions centering on references to the: unspoken; implicit; inferred; implied; understood; understood; unprofessed; undeclared etc. However, I am heading off at a tangent, in a direction that will lead me nowhere in a hurry I think, so let me try and get myself back on track with some questions, again:

- In the short term, do we need to find a way (or more likely in my opinion, a series of ways) to uncover all tacit knowledge, or could we be relatively content in progressively introducing and improving ways to uncover certain classes of tacit knowledge?

- Will our improved methods in discovering and uncovering of certain classes of tacit knowledge help us to understand tacit knowledge in any way?

- By following a process of uncovering and understanding tacit knowledge does that knowledge become explicit knowledge or does it remain partially or wholly tacit?

- Under what circumstances would be wish to promote the growth of knowledge as tacit knowledge and not explicit knowledge?

- Which in someway is linked to the question of how can we transfer tacit knowledge without making it explicit?

Well those are just some musings and questions re. Tacit Knowledge, which leads us to the next related issue of collaboration.

Collaboration:

To paraphrase an old saying “many are called but few collaborate” or as one fashion editor once remarked about a lucrative job offer from a leading New York fashion and glamour publisher “I wouldn’t get out of bed for that much”.

- What would you say are the top three barriers that prevent collaboration from working as effectively as it could do in business (and maybe also government)?

- In which way does society need to change in order for us to deal more fairly with, for example, intellectual capital, ownership issues and personal rights?

- In your view, how important are the personal and group identities in nurturing collaboration?

As you can see from the above, there is a pattern to this message, which can roughly be interpreted as, the more things become clearer to me the more questions pop up in my head.

Representation:

For me at least, Knowledge engineering represents a field of research that has been mainly fraught with great ideas in search of real problems. Knowledge representation paradigms of the past have often failed in practice because on the one hand they have been relatively easy to use in the construction of prototypes but devilishly difficult and horrendously costly to expand and maintain applications that rely on those paradigms. One application case in point is the former DEC configuration adviser, which although used a fairly simple representation paradigm on a relatively small class of problems has proven to be quite a project management nightmare and very costly and painful to keep alive.

- How could we continue to use conventional representation paradigms such as books, documents, pictures, spoken word, video, music, symbols, movement etc. whilst at the same time making their creation, use and revision amenable to knowledge work?
- What level of sophistication would be required in order to be able to capture emergent knowledge from ephemeral exchanges? Would we be looking at tools and techniques for extracting meaning from interchanges such as emails between employees, and project report meetings (e.g. synthesis of audio discussions, topic identification and “meaning” extraction) and scanning of project documents?
- Another question, and I will start with prior apologies to the plain English folk here, really concerns the usefulness of representing tacit knowledge. Does success in the field of KM, knowledge representation and corresponding capability maturity, with special regard to the replication of, the representation schemas and paradigms of tacit knowledge in humans, in tacit knowledge in machines, simply mean a move from one form of not knowing to another? Put another way, does the liquid in the bottle marked Uncle Bob’s Best Sherry tell us any more about itself than the chemical representation of its contents hidden in the dark virtual corridors of an IBM White computer system?

The area of representation for me certainly seems to be the hardest call, and one that one the face of it seems the easiest. Anyways, lets see how far we can develop the themes here.

I hope all these questions will inspire some answers from everyone – it would be a great help.

Thanks and best regards,

Martyn

Martyn R Jones
Iniciatia Consulting

• KM 23/09/2001

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Follow Ups:

• Representation questions Denham 22:37:58 09/02/01 (2)
  • Questions and Answers Martyn R Jones 02:42:37 09/06/01 (1)
    • Re: Questions and Answers john fitterling 17:43:02 10/03/01 (0)
• Collaboration questions Denham 22:17:58 09/02/01 (1)
  • Re: Collaboration questions Simon 21:36:51 09/06/01 (0)
• Tacit knowledge questions Denham 22:03:19 09/02/01 (0)

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