Explicit Knowledge is useful of course, and every organization serious about KM will capture lessons learned and other knowledge from past projects, clients, etc. However, this Explicit Knowledge is USELESS without the people that can interpret it! That’s why I combined the responsibilities for KM and Competency Development — it takes people at Mastery and Expertise level to contextualize, interpret, update, etc. the Knowledge that is made available to the more junior staff members.

Of course, the evolution of IT and especially Search Technology is beneficial to KM. Enterprise Search (Google or other) does increase the findability of content. Unfortunately, it does not increase the usability of knowledge…

In my practice we’ve set up wikis and SharePoint repositories, not really as means for storing Explicit Knowledge, but rather to document contextual information about any significant knowledge. This contextual information (which contains background, what worked, what didn’t, why, recommendations, people who were involved) is then evaluated by users to determine if personal contact is needed to get in-touch with the Tacit Knowledge.

Those repositories are typically organized as portals to static (yellow pages type) information, project notes, reference information, Lessons Learned and Best Practices. Everything is organized by Categories and Keywords agreed upon by the user communities. It’s not perfect, but seems to be working fairly well.

Thanks,

Slawomir

Once you get people contributing then let search technology do the rest. Google Apps has a “Sites” feature that allows just that, AND you get to use the best search technology on the planet to search internally within a domain that your firm fully controls.

There’s a paper on my blog entitled “Search, KM & the Practice of Law” that you might find of interest.

I have found the distinction between tacit and explicit to hamper the implementation of KM projects. Participants too often fail to realize that they need to convert their sharing of knowledge to form that is accessible and findable by others. Even if they write it down they think that the writing alone makes it useable by others.

The classic example is the forwarded email: “this is great stuff. Save it in the KM system.” Usually, the email lacks any of the information needed to reuse it. The authorship is broken, the context of the message is difficult to decipher and there is no meaningful place to store and retrieve it.

In the legal environment Tacit to Tacit learning can occur when a young lawyer accompanies somebody more experienced in the courtroom, learning by doing and observing. Tacit to Explicit occurs when the young lawyer documents and publishes his/her Lessons Learned. Explicit to Explicit happens when a Community of Practice analyzes Lessons Learned to distill them to Best Practices in particular contexts. Explicit to Tacit occurs when a different lawyer in a different context reads and understands the documents and starts practicing the lessons in his/her own praxis.

Thanks,

Slawomir