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.

Definition of Knowledge Management

Knowledge management, then, can be defined as the systematic strategy of creating, conserving, and sharing knowledge to increase the performance of individuals, companies, or nations (Plunkett 2001; Heinrichs et al. 2003). Knowledge management attempts to provide methods for managing both explicit and tacit knowledge. Sometimes this means primarily socially-based methods that help person-to-person knowledge exchanges. Other methods can take advantage of existing explicit knowledge that has already been codified for other purposes to make it more readily accessible (Hansen et al. 1999). But knowledge management also concentrates on methods that help the process of moving from tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge and thus expand the amount of codified knowledge available for use (Heinrichs et al. 2003). Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) describes a typology of knowledge practices based on the conversion of knowledge from one form to another:

• Socialization: where tacit knowledge is shared through shared experiences by individuals,

• Externalization: where tacit knowledge is articulated into explicit knowledge with the help of metaphors and analogies,

• Combination: where explicit knowledge is systemized and refined e.g. by utilizing information and communication technologies and existing databases,

• Internalization: where explicit knowledge is converted into tacit knowledge, e.g. by learning by doing