Knowledge Management processes
What is Knowledge Management?
Access to knowledge and the ability to use it wisely have always been the hallmark of successful individuals, companies, and even nations. Thus the recognition that knowledge has great value has been with us for a long time. But until fairly recently, most people did not think in terms of “managing knowledge”; they felt that knowledge was a personal asset as the sum of our experiences, education, and our informal community of friends and colleagues that can be trusted to help perform better in our complex world.
As computer technology improved and became cheaper in the early 1990’s, researchers in academia, government, and private industry began to explore the gains that could be made by organizing knowledge, codifying it, and sharing it more widely. The early innovators began to demonstrate that actively improving the management of knowledge could help scientists improve getting their research results into the hands of users.
Explicit and Tacit Knowledge
Knowledge exists in either explicit or tacit states. Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been codified in some way such as scientific journal articles, operating procedures, databases, etc. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge that people carry in their minds. It consists of subjective opinions, intuition, feelings or judgments. People often do not explicitly know about their own knowledge stores (“we know more than we know how to say”, Polyani 1958).
Knowledge about natural resource management is multifaceted and spans a broad spectrum of spatial, temporal and process scales. Its domains are biological, physical and social (Simard 2000, Innes 2003). Declarative knowledge like facts, propositions or schemas provide general knowledge about the behavior and functioning of ecosystems. It includes episodic knowledge (specific time and place events) and semantic knowledge (facts and general information). Procedural knowledge is about how to do things. Individuals, companies, organizations, universities and nations provide a rich mixture of ideas, contextually relevant facts and expertise for declarative and procedural knowledge.
