Tacit and Explicit forms of Organizational Knowledge - Essay Example

UNDERSTANDING OF STRATEGY IN PRACTICE BY VIRTUE OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TACIT AND EXPLICT FORMS OF ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE The modern day management is faced by many challenges and those in the helm of company's management are faced with many dilemmas when it comes to designing and implementing company strategy. Many managerial consultant firms are also faced with the same dilemma since their consultancy seems incomplete, inconsistent and contradictory to the outcomes. There is lack of coherence in the field of management and the problem seems to be growing day by day. According to Sanchez Ron (1997), organization management is a task that involves clear understanding of the organization and its components. Knowledge management describes a set of discipline and systematic actions which are implemented in an organization and which helps in obtaining the greatest value in terms of performance of the organization from the knowledge applied in making decisions. According to Dimitris Karagiannis (2005), knowledge is a combination of many factors which together makes up strategies that helps in making decisions. It includes aspects of understanding of the organization and its people and the experience with the organization or others in the same line. It includes organized information from documents and other artefacts in the organization or outside. It is a difficult task to organize knowledge and get the best value from it. There must be highly organized initiative in the aspects of organization itself, its people and the enabling environment. According to Sanchez Ron (2001), knowledge management is a technology by itself which helps in assessing the actual and potential contribution to the process of creating and sharing of new ideas and decisions in an organization. It is good to understand that knowledge management is more of a process than a product. It represents a process in which ideas and facts are gathered, carefully analyzed and considered before arriving at any strategy. It forms the bases for effective planning and understanding of a strategy. It provides a way in which unstructured data is processed to become a more useful data that can form basis of strategizing for the benefit of the organization. The process consists of some components that are important and cannot be ignored. It requires consulted effort or collaboration from all quarters of the organization. It is important for all to contribute to the process in order to have diverse knowledge about a subject matter. In requires the aspect of content management and taxonomy management. Hence any effective organizational management must put into practice the knowledge management process in order to have effective strategies that work for the organization. According to Chun Choo and Nick Bontis, (2007), there are two broadly recognized approaches or technologies to management that are currently practiced in many companies and which are being advocated by many consultant firms. Sound management strategies require an extremely creating synthesis of the two approaches as each helps to offset the limitations of the other. The two approaches that are being advocated in company strategy are tacit and explicit forms of knowledge are being used in organizational management. The two approaches are merely forms of organized knowledge that can be applied in management. They are knowledge approaches which are fundamental in making decision. In the process of codification or articulation, tacit knowledge can be transformed to explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge approach in strategies As the name suggest, this is the knowledge that cannot be easily shared with other people. It is the knowledge that is possessed inside and which is difficult to communicate to the organization unless through an enhanced process of knowledge management. This is the kind of knowledge that people carry in their minds. It is a form of knowledge that is difficult to access unless one is willing to contribute it to the organization. Most of the time very few people are aware of the contribution they can make to their organizations in terms of planning of strategies simply because they are not aware of the tacit knowledge they posses. It can be described as the habits and cultures that no one thinks or knows that they have and which can be useful to the organization. This knowledge is sometimes referred to as "know-how'" which means it is not facts but rather understanding based on experiences and extensive practical application. It is the knowledge gained through experiment and not through reading. If we take the example of riding a bicycle, it can be understood that one can read instruction about riding from a manual but it takes personal practice to become a competition bicycle rider or to acquire skills about riding. Hence it represents skills that can be learned but not written down. If a company wants to overhaul it production process in order to keep up to new competitors, it need to gather enough knowledge from the workers before implementing the strategy. It will largely depend on workers who have the tacit knowledge of where the company is failing since they are the one who are involved in daily operation of the company. They have more practical approaches to the production and sales area than do the management it self. According to Rezaif Adli (2007), this knowledge is most valuable and is basically derived from experience coupled with beliefs and values. It is the knowledge that can be easily turned to actions in the process of decision making. It forms the bases on which any process of generation of knowledge for organizations lies. Tacit knowledge comes from personal experiences and understanding of the organization and its working structures. It is valuable since it takes into consideration the atmosphere in which an organization operates and the requirements of excellence as a factor of consideration. It is based on what has been observed or experienced over a long period of time and hence in most cases it is bases of prediction of the future. It is with the basic knowledge that the role of any management should be to forecast for the future needs of the company in terms of all its components. Tacit knowledge hence becomes an important tool which helps in forecasting and making strategies. Tacit knowledge is the base of an innovative process. It helps in harnessing all practical ideas about a management strategy and helps in putting it down to practice. In the corporate world, the concept of tacit knowledge was introduced by Nonaka and Takeuchin (1995), who emphasized that company in Japan were more successful since they harnessed tacit knowledge of individuals in a company. This led to making of more working strategies which are bound to succeed since they have the support and have put into consideration all the experiences and knowledge. They gave the example of a bread maker who could not develop his company well since he did not have the necessary knowledge, but after taking in Engineers for internships, the company became a success since they learned the tacit knowledge involved in kneading a bread and transformed this to a useful knowledge in the company and which turned the company a success. With the understanding of the difficulty that is involved in the sharing of the tacit knowledge, it is hence appropriate for companies to have a knowledge management process in the managerial ranks. This is important because tacit knowledge will reach all those in the company without a face to face contact with the one contributing the knowledge. This process also helps to internalize the knowledge in the organization culture which has an effect of passing it on to the succeeding generation of workers. It helps to embed important ideas necessary for planning strategies for a company. Many strategies implemented in many organizations fail because they do not take into consideration the tacit knowledge of those in the decision making process. Many a time is when a management job is given based on academic qualifications. Academic qualification is just formal knowledge and has facts which can fail of work in different circumstances and in different companies. It has become a trend where those with academic qualifications are given years to develop tacit knowledge before they rise to managerial jobs. According to Phillippe Baumard (1999), this knowledge is easy and relatively inexpensive to begin. It is easy to acquire and not expensive but it requires time and experience. When making strategy it should be considered, which will make it easy for employees to recognize it in the strategy. Once the knowledge is inculcated in the organization culture, and it become available to all the employees, they easily understand it when incorporated in any strategy. This makes the strategy easy to understand and acceptable to the organization. It is likely to give the organization more interest and knowledge in the management process. This enhance he organization management process and knowledge management process. It also represent a form of storage of important message which makes it secure to conceal important organizational knowledge to the competitors. However not all individual may posses the knowledge they express they have. It also represents a hectic process in which individuals needs to be updated now and then about new developments and their profiles need also to be updated. It is also understood that since the knowledge has to be transformed to explicit knowledge to be disseminated to other people, the process is costly and take time. It has a disadvantage in that once people are endowed with the knowledge, they may decide to leave the organization which is a loss to the organization. Explicit knowledge approach in strategies Explicit knowledge is the knowledge that is put to facts and recorded in database. It is easy to access and analyze since these databases can be retrieved at will. Explicit knowledge is universals and technical in nature. This knowledge represents theories that have been tried from the tacit knowledge and recorded in books and which can be accessed by all people. This knowledge forms the bases of training in formal schools. It is knowledge that is technical in nature. Explicit knowledge is very important in developing competitive work force as it imparts the basic rules, laws and principles. They are helping in understating the nature of work and its environment and are the bases of further developments of tacit knowledge. In the process of making strategies and plans, explicit knowledge is important as it forms the reference material for the basic planning before the strategy graduates to the scrutiny of tacit knowledge. According to Chilton Bloodgood (2007), theories and rules found in explicit knowledge are important in strategizing since a strategy that is bound to succeed must not contradict the basic rules and laws. This knowledge represents the basic of a professional and encompasses the body of skills necessary for practicing the professional in question. It represents the skills that allow scientific or technologic knowledge to be practiced and tested. For example, a food production company which wants to introduce a new food item in the market must put into consideration all the health concerns to ensure that the product is produced as per the health laws existing in the country. As such the company will depend on the knowledge in books and other materials as reference material before drafting the new strategy on the production of the new item. This knowledge has advantage in that in making and understanding strategies, the knowledge can be moved easily and accessed by majority of the organizational staff and since many staff will have the basic understanding of the knowledge based on their academic qualification, they will easily understand the strategy which makes their implementation more effective. The codified message can be disseminated to more people to understand the use of specific forms of knowledge. It is also easily disseminated since it can be discussed, debated and changes made depending on individual contribution. Hence this is one of the best means of planning strategies for an organization since it can include contribution from many people which enhance the effective of the strategy and reduces chances of failure since it will be acceptable to majority of the population. Conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge also helps to understand the level and usefulness of the knowledge that is in an organization and hence helps in determining the knowledge gap in the organization. This is important for an organization in determining if it needs to outsource for information from other sources. The process of converting the knowledge however takes times and some tacit knowledge may be lost in the codifying process of leak out to others. This knowledge is universally practiced and hence too much reliance on it may be a recipe for failure of organization strategies since many companies will be planning their strategies along the line of the explicit knowledge. There are various ways that can be used to transform tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. This mainly takes place in the learning process where all individual in the organization participates. Knowledge in an organization can be disseminated through socialization, internalization in the organization values, combination, and also through externalization. It is through socialization that tacit knowledge can be obtained. Hence it is important the organization encourage sharing between people not only in meeting abut also in the normal work process. According to Casselman and Samson (2005), the externalization process is the one which helps to codify tacit knowledge to explicit form. Individual tacit information may be capture through conceptualization, elicitation and articulation. Hence the communication process is very important in helping to codify tacit information. For example, if the management wants to make a certain strategy, they may begin by asking worker individuals of their overview of the situation. This is an indirect way of brainstorming and from which more useful information can be gained. The organization can also encourage workers to share and through an organized knowledge process, much tacit information can be gained. Then the management can call for brainstorming sessions of the management staff and all others staff participating in the information process. Through brainstorming, the management can gain a lot of information which will be very important in planning the strategies. Brainstorming will help to incorporate both tacit and explicit information and combine them together in planning the strategies. References Bloodgood, C. (2007). The dimensions of Tacit and Explicit knowledge: A Description and Measures. Oxford University. Casselman, R.M. and D. Samson. (2005). Moving Beyond Tacit and Explicit: Four Dimensions of Knowledge. Proceeding of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference, Issue 30-06 Jan. 2005: 243b - 243b. Chilton, B. (2007). The dimensions of Tacit and Explicit knowledge: A Descriptive and Measure. 40th Annual Hawaii International conference on System Science. Choo, W. C. and Bontis, N. (2007). Knowledge, Intellectual capital and Strategy: Themes and Tensions. University of Toronto. Dimitris, K. (2005). Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management. Oxford University. Nonaka, I. and H. Takeuchi, (1995). The Knowledge of Creating Company. Oxford University Press. Phillip, B. (1999). Tacit Knowledge in Organization. New York University Ron, S. (1997). Managing articulated knowledge in competence-based competition. Chicheester: John Wiley and Sons. Ron, S. (2001). Managing Knowledge into competences: The five learning cycles of competent organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruzaif, A. (2007). 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