Hello world, I’m back!
Sorry about the delay with the blog posts. Unending projects, a job (of which I am now no longer working), and various illnesses have kept me away for far too long. But regardless, I have no got some time to finish up this blog post I started a while back, and please make note that another will be coming later in the week as well (couple of days to the weekend). That being said, let’s get on with the actual post!
This time, I decided to do something a bit different. I am doing some blog reviews at the same time as these posts, so I thought to myself, “why not see what everyone else is posting about when looking for my own articles? If I find it interesting anyway, I can read more and write about it!” So that is what I did. The articles this week were inspired by the words and stories presented in some of my other classmates’ own posts. Now to the articles.
The first article that I took a look at was Knowledge outsourcing: an alternative strategy for knowledge management (Lam & Chua, 2009). The authors purpose behind this article was to present the alternative strategy of using knowledge outsourcing instead of insourcing for knowledge management. Basically, Knowledge Outsourcing or KO is where an organization utilizes outside assistance in the form of experts external to the organization in order to generate knowledge assets for the organization’s use, and internalization.
The article gave a good summary on the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of both methods, and was overall very interesting to read about. The article also went into great detail as to how a knowledge outsource process would look like, and when it would be best to implement rather than use knowledge insourcing. They concluded that the process would work best for those who either didn’t want to internalize Knowledge Management, or couldn’t due to lack of the ability or resources to develop and upkeep such a process within their organization.
The second article, Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues (Alavi & Leidner, 2001), was all about areas of Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) research, processes, and how IT can be used to support this research. This was a reading that I found just a tad dull, but I think I understood it well enough to take away some important conclusions.
The first conclusion that authors made was that knowledge is diverse in the fact it can be “tacit or explicit; refer to objects, a cognitive state, or a capability; can reside in individuals, groups, documents,” (Alavi & Leidner, 2001) or a number of other things; for this reason, there can be no single or best way to conduct knowledge management, or build a knowledge management system. The second conclusion is that knowledge management itself involves four interdependent processes: knowledge creation, storage and retrieval, transfer, and application. Any and all of these processes can be going on at any point of time in an organization, but more importantly, whatever resources, tools, or approaches used in the knowledge management process depends on the type of process being used, as well as its scope and characteristics.
The final article I read through was What is organizational knowledge? (Tsoukas, 2001), which examined the relationships between organizational knowledge, individual knowledge, and human action and how all of this related to knowledge management. They defined knowledge as “knowledge is the individual ability to draw distinctions
within a collective domain of action, based on an appreciation of context or theory, or
both”. This refers to the idea that knowledge is inherently related to human action in the fact that knowledge is thought to influence our actions. Organizations are found to be three different things at once: 1) concrete settings for individual action, 2) abstract rules taking the form of propositional statements, and 3) historical communities. Knowledge becomes organizational knowledge when “individuals draw and act upon a corpus of generalizations in the form of generic rules produced by the organization”.
Those are the main take-aways that I got from reading these articles, so how does this relate to what we have previously read? We found further confirmation that tacit knowledge is an important part of actual knowledge, and one of the reasons that knowledge is so hard to quantify or organize. You basically have to build your knowledge management practices based around your organization and your needs, and thus there cannot truly be a single process applied to all situations.
When looking back at my previous post, I would say that the individuals in an organization has a lot more power over the knowledge management process than anything else. Social capital was found to be a heavy influence on the quality of knowledge in organizations, and that despite the idea behind “best practices” being supposedly being more efficient overall, we see that in actual practice, many individuals have their own “best practices” that often enough work better than the organization’s. All in all, tacit knowledge and the nature of knowledge itself seems to be the biggest obstacle in the knowledge management process, and makes identifying and codifying knowledge more difficult. I find it curious to think that we are basically trying to solidify something so diverse and intangible such as knowledge in some sort of single, most efficient, practice, when in reality, much like what was concluded in Alavi & Leidner’s (2001) article, it doesn’t really exist.
Sources:
Alavi, M., & Leidner, D. E. (2001). Knowledge management and knowledge management systems: Conceptual foundations and research issues. MIS Quarterly, 25(1), 107-136. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250961
Lam, W., & Chua, A. Y. (2009). Knowledge outsourcing: An alternative strategy for knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(3), 28-43. doi:1108/13673270910962851
Tsoukas, H. (2001). What is organizational knowledge? Journal of Management Studies, 38(7), 973-993. doi:1111/1467-6486.00268
Matt Taylor 
Hmm. When you say, “it doesn’t really exist”; I think you are saying that it can’t be carried by any IT system. That is, of course, the inherent aspect of tacit knowledge; since it is not written down, it can’t be carried. It can’t be measured, folded, spindled, or mutilated either. Which it very hard to deal with. I think that’s why so many of the articles deal with story telling, metaphors, social capital, and communities of practice.
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Exactly! I am commenting on the fact that part of the world’s knowledge is tacit in nature, and therefore cannot truly be quantified into any sort of system, only experienced and learned from said experiences. Pain is a good example of this. Say I was stung by a wasp, and tried to explain what it felt like to someone who hasn’t. It would be impossible to transfer the feeling of the pain I experienced, only that it was uncomfortable and that I wouldn’t recommend giving it a try. The only thing we can really do is observe and try and relate our observations and experiences to others in an attempt to give a vague idea of our experiences second hand.
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Y’all might be forgetting about YouTube, which as far as how-to (know-how) videos go, is the the prime repository of tacit knowledge. Think ‘show and not just tell’ style of knowledge storage.
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I did in fact forget about YouTube! When considering video repositories such as this, I suppose that sites like Twitch or Discord work as good knowledge storage places as well.
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I think that is less about trying to “solidify” something that “doesn’t really exist”, and more about trying to develop a systematic approach to sharing and expanding an often intangible asset. There has been a lot of study done on the taxonomy, codification, and compartmentalization of knowledge, especially in the context of an organization. Additionally, there has been significant work and focus on the development and expansion of platforms for the storage, transfer, and sharing of that knowledge in both its codified form and unstructured form.
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Perhaps you are right. I can definitely see what you are trying to say here, but as I said in my response to Matt, I was more focused on the idea that more tacit knowledge isn’t quantifiable, and therefore cannot be put into any system. We are, however, making progress into making previously considered tacit knowledge into something more tangible.
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