Organizational Knowledge

LIS 880 Knowledge Management

Session 4

Readings This Week

• Epistemology • The Fundamental Question of What

Knowledge is• Designed to get you thinking about something

you may never have thought about• We are most concerned with Organizational

Knowledge

A Question to Begin With

• Data• Information • Knowledge

Is there a difference and if so, what is it?

Data Qualities

• Particles of information• Must be interpreted to ascertain meaning• Can be mined and thus interpreted a variety of

ways

Information Qualities

• Can exist independent of knowledge and data but yet reliant on each in most instances

• Think of an encyclopedia: Is it codified knowledge?

• An encyclopedia can be someone’s knowledge codified but information to someone who has not yet come to “know” the topic and yet derived initially from data (ex: Lung Cancer)

Knowledge Qualities

• What does it mean to know?• Explicit versus Tacit knowledge

Organizational Knowledge

• Explicit = codified and thus can be indexed and retrieved as “information”

• Tacit = Embodied Knowledge– Experience based– “know-how”– Difficult to codify

• Embedded Knowledge– Contained in processes, procedures and organizational

policies– Can be difficult to manage

Levels of Knowledge in an Organization

• Certain individuals hold key knowledge• Can define power structuresIndividual

• Not shared with the rest of the organization• Communities of Practice – often information and

share key information to enable work

Groups / Communities

• Can be codified and represented• Intranets, manuals, policies etc.Structural

• Little consensus on what constitutes organizational knowledge

• Can be a combination of any of the above or allOrganizational

1. Data

2. Information

3. Capture

4. Knowledge Acquisition

5. Index

6. Disseminate

Knowledge Cycle

SECI Model – Nonaka & Takeuchi