Posted by Kees de Vos on June 20, 1999 at 14:58:17:

In Reply to: What is the difference between information and explicit knowledge? posted by Kees de Vos on June 02, 1999 at 17:36:29:

In my previous posting I tried to point out that the direction Nonaka and Takeuchi's work seems to indicate (explicating knowledge) might not be an effective way of ensuring cross-company knowledge appliance. In my view knowledge is always strictly tight to individuals and their personal referential frameworks. Knowledge sharing is therefor impossible as two parties don't have the same background. Knowledge sharing should therefor be renamed to knowledge replication (sharing suggests division, but knowledge doesn't loose any value when being shared/replicated, also by communication knowledge is recreated at the senders as well as at the receivers end).

So does this suggest that ICT can not be helpful in creating a knowledge environment/knowledge ecology? No, it doesn't, it merely suggests another direction. Instead of trying to painstakingly explicate knowledge (and therefor its context) a better approach might be to focus on the communications part in ICT.
Try removing as much of the context from the knowledge as possible (transforming best practices into best principles) without compromising the "gut-feeling-factor-of-applicability". Think of it as say for example the Ten Commandments. The fit on two stones and are applicable in various contexts. Imagine what they would have been like if they/He would have tried to explicate all the knowledge they represent, we might have had a second Great Wall... in Israel.

Creating such a big wall obviously would have been a big undertaking, nowadays however such "great works" are fairly easily accomplished in document management with the use of IT. Enormous datawarehouses are build just to contain all this information. If one changed this approach by using ICT to connect people we might be far more successful in replication knowledge.

For example, we are using a system based on Yellow Pages. Project summaries are uploaded containing facts/information on the project, the customer and the role of the employee. Also a personal context is added, written by the employee him-/herself so ones some sort of feeling for their backgrounds. In the evaluations they present the best principles they came up with during the project. Users of the system hereby get a first feeling for the applicability of these principles in the context of their own projects. If they see/feel a "fit" with their own situation the "Yellow Pages" present the contact information for connecting to these persons, providing means of communication/conversation that tend to be very effective in aligning their individual referential frameworks, hereby adding to each others knowledge.

So basically while using ICT:
- Less is more;
- Replicating knowledge is about connecting people-to-people, not information-to-information;
- Focus on best principles instead of best practices (which are only useful if the context is the same).

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Proposed direction for ICT solutions ron dw 19:27:36 6/20/99 (3)
  • Re: Proposed direction for ICT solutions Kees de Vos 04:24:35 6/21/99 (2)
    • Re: Proposed direction for ICT solutions ron dw 06:02:28 6/21/99 (1)
      • Re: Proposed direction for ICT solutions Kees de Vos 08:30:18 6/21/99 (0)

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