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Information Technology for Knowledge Management

Better Essays

In: Journal of Universal Computer Science 3:8, August 1997

Information Technology for Knowledge Management
Uwe M. Borghoff
Rank Xerox Research Centre, Grenoble Laboratory 6, chemin de Maupertuis. F-38240 Meylan, France E-mail: borghoff@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com

Remo Pareschi
Rank Xerox Research Centre, Grenoble Laboratory 6, chemin de Maupertuis. F-38240 Meylan, France E-mail: pareschi@grenoble.rxrc.xerox.com

Abstract: Knowledge has been lately recognized as one of the most important assets of organizations. Can information technology help the growth and the sustainment of organizational knowledge? The answer is yes, if care is taken to remember that IT here is just a part of the story (corporate culture and work practices being …show more content…

Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and is shared and exchanged through direct, eyeto-eye contact. Clearly, tacit knowledge can be communicated in a most direct and effective way. By contrast, acquisition of explicit knowledge is indirect: it must be de-coded and re-coded into one’s mental models, where it is then internalized as tacit knowledge. In reality, these two types of knowledge are like two sides of the same coin, and are equally relevant for the overall knowledge of an organization. Tacit knowledge is practical knowledge that is key to getting things done, but has been sadly neglected in the past, falling very often victim to the latest management fad. For instance, the recent spate of business process re-engineering initiatives, where cost reduction was generally identified with the laying off of people—the real and only repositories of tacit knowledge—has damaged the tacit knowledge of many organizations. Explicit knowledge defines the identity, the competencies and the intellectual assets of an organization independently of its employees; thus, it is organizational knowledge par excellence, but it can grow and sustain itself only through a rich background of tacit knowledge. Indeed, the other great discovery of the knowledge movement lies in the following simple observation: knowledge that doesn’t flow doesn’t grow and eventually ages

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and becomes obsolete and useless—just as

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