Intranets 2.0: The Battle for Tacit Knowledge

Intranets 2.0: This writer attended the Intranets 07 conference in Sydney, and — as was expected — everyone was talking about “Enterprise 2.0.”  The writer, however, makes an astute observation about management’s current level of comfort with the Revolution.

[…] there seemed to be a real dichotomy in the language being used. On the one hand speakers when describing their Intranets were talking about standards, compliance, custodians, approval, reviews, structured, efficiency, control, and ’single source of truth’. Yet on the other hand, they mused that intranets were about ‘people, people, people’ and that they were trying to improve collaboration, increase knowledge sharing and foster networks.

I put this down to what appears to be a lack of or poor understanding about the differences between information and knowledge. It seems that many organisations still have a mindset that knowledge management is about trying to codify explicit knowledge - finding it and sticking it in a database, which will in-turn improve sharing and collaboration. However, in doing so, they are ignoring tacit knowledge and the social aspects of learning.

The writers references an interesting paper — “The duality of knowledge” from 2002.  In its abstract, it says:

Recently there has been recognition that some knowledge cannot be quantified and cannot be captured, codified or stored.  However, the predominant approach to the management of this knowledge remains to try to convert it to a form that can be handled using the ‘traditional’ approach.

In this paper, we argue that this approach is flawed and some knowledge simply cannot be captured.  A method is needed which recognises that knowledge resides in people: not in machines or documents.

More on this paper after I have a chance to read it.