DB - Knowledge Codification : Suppose you were the chief knowledge officer in a company and wanted to start a project whereby

people could share with others all the tacit knowledge they had. Some of this knowledge includes information about the market and key customers which ones are good to talk to, which ones are rude and which ones have a pencha nt for fancy gifts. 1. What might be some ways in which such information could be shared among emplo yees? 2. Should everyone send emails to each other? Should they write their opinion on a bulletin board? What other formal IT platform can be used? On-line Disc From my perspective, there is a great deal of useful information that people can share virtually, for example, in an on-line discussion or a list-serve. Im a gre at advocate of such discussions and have written in CompanyCommand about their v alue. Members of the community can share their experience, support others, and p rovide solutions or answers to some types of questions. For example, a member ca n write, I need some new ideas about how to do a safety briefing, because having given them too many times, my briefings have become old and stale. then others ca n respond by describing how they do safety briefings. Or a member can ask, Has an yone had trouble making an HP printer scan from a Mac? and others can offer their own suggestions. However, my experience with these kinds of on-line discussions is that members w ho respond to a question rarely ask for any context. Rather they respond in decl arative statements about their own experience or they offer their own rules of t humb. Seldom is there an attempt for asker and responder to probe the meaning th at the other is attempting to convey. For this reason I think on-line discussion s are not an effective way to share tacit knowledge. What about phone or email exchanges? A phone call has greater possibilities for sharing tacit knowledge than does ema il, but still has limits that can reduce the extent of the back and forth of con versation. Any conversation has two levels of meaning that are constantly being conveyed. One is about content and the other is about who the asker and responde r are in relation to each other. The second conveys such information as, Can I tr ust you to not think less of me if I dont understand immediately? or I dont really h ave time to answer your question in detail. That conversation is expressed throug h intonation, gestures, and facial expression, little of which can be conveyed o ver the phone and none of which can be conveyed by email thus the profusion of m isunderstandings that email generates! Either medium is more likely to serve the transfer of tacit knowledge if the two people are well acquainted, which provid es past experience with which to fill in or interpret the second conversation. B ut by-and-large, email and phone are less effective mediums for transferring tac it knowledge than is a face-to-face conversation like Hans had with the technici an. http://www.nancydixonblog.com/2011/04/conversations-that-share-tacit-knowledge.h tml