Building organisational knowledge
Key takeaways
- Organisational knowledge is one of the resources a quality management system relies on: what the organisation and its people know about doing their work well, and it can be lost overnight if it is never captured.
- Tacit knowledge is personal, experience-based and hard to write down; explicit knowledge has been documented and can be transferred directly.
- Capture draws knowledge out of a person's head; codification writes it down in a structured, reusable form, turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that survives the expert's departure.
- The knowledge management cycle runs: create or acquire, capture and codify, store, share and disseminate, apply, then review and update as the knowledge ages.
- Retain knowledge before an expert leaves through documentation, mentoring, a searchable repository and job rotation, and flag, update or retire outdated knowledge so the repository does not mislead.
Organizational knowledge is one of the resources a quality management system relies on (see Quality Management System, on resources), what an organisation and its people know about how to do their work well, and, unlike a machine or a budget, it can be lost overnight if it is never captured.
History of knowledge management
Knowledge management emerged as a distinct discipline in the 1990s, as organisations recognised that expertise leaving with departing staff was a real, measurable loss, building on older ideas from organisational learning and information management into a deliberate practice of capturing, storing and reusing what an organisation collectively knows.
Why knowledge management matters
- Prevents the loss of expertise when experienced staff leave
- Avoids repeating past mistakes and re-solving already-solved problems
- Speeds up decision making by making relevant knowledge easy to find
- Supports consistent quality, since a documented best practice can be applied the same way every time
- Enables innovation, by making it easier to combine existing knowledge in new ways
Types of knowledge management
Acquisition and application tools
- Interviews and debriefs with experienced staff
- Observation of expert practice in action
- Document and record review
- Communities of practice and structured knowledge-sharing sessions (see the next chapter)
- Knowledge-management software and databases
Capture and codification
Capture is drawing knowledge out of a person's head or an informal source; codification is writing it down in a structured, reusable form, a procedure, a checklist, a case study, converting tacit knowledge into something explicit that survives the original expert's departure.
The knowledge management cycle
- Create or acquire knowledge
- Capture and codify it (above)
- Store it in an accessible repository
- Share and disseminate it (see the chapter on sharing and transforming knowledge)
- Apply it in practice
- Review and update it as it ages
Knowledge management models
Retention methods
- Documenting procedures and lessons learned before an expert departs
- Mentoring and structured handover periods (see Employability Skills, in the chapter on leading a workplace team)
- Maintaining a searchable knowledge repository
- Rotating staff through roles to spread knowledge more widely before any one person becomes a single point of failure
Outdated and invalid knowledge
Knowledge repositories need the same lifecycle discipline as any other documentation (see Quality Management System, on the documentation lifecycle): outdated procedures, superseded standards or knowledge based on a process that no longer exists must be flagged, reviewed and either updated or retired, or a repository becomes actively misleading rather than useful.
Self-check
(a) Distinguish tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge, with one workplace example of each. (4 marks)
(b) State four benefits of knowledge management to an organisation. (4 marks)
(c) List the six stages of the knowledge management cycle in order. (6 marks)
(d) Distinguish knowledge capture from knowledge codification. (2 marks)
(e) Explain the DIKW knowledge hierarchy. (2 marks)
(f) A senior technician who is the only person who knows how to troubleshoot a particular machine fault is retiring in three months. Recommend two knowledge-retention actions and justify each. (4 marks)
Show worked answer
(a) Tacit knowledge is personal, experience-based knowledge that is hard to write down, such as a technician's intuition for when a process is drifting. Explicit knowledge has been documented, in manuals or procedures, and can be transferred directly, such as a written standard operating procedure.
(b) Prevents loss of expertise when staff leave; avoids repeating past mistakes; speeds up decision making; supports consistent quality; enables innovation. Any four.
(c) Create or acquire knowledge; capture and codify it; store it in an accessible repository; share and disseminate it; apply it in practice; review and update it as it ages.
(d) Capture is drawing knowledge out of a person's head or an informal source. Codification is writing it down in a structured, reusable form such as a procedure or checklist.
(e) The DIKW hierarchy describes a progression from raw facts (Data) to facts given context (Information) to understanding gained from information (Knowledge) to applied judgement built on knowledge (Wisdom).
(f) Document the specific troubleshooting procedure before the technician leaves, converting their tacit knowledge into an explicit, reusable form; and arrange a structured mentoring or handover period pairing them with a successor, since some of what they know may be too situational to fully capture in a document alone.
Exam tip
The tacit/explicit distinction underlies almost every other topic in this chapter, a question asking how to 'capture' or 'retain' knowledge is really asking how to convert tacit knowledge into explicit form before it is lost.