Angelique Selmon
Week 10 Discussion Post

Tacit/explicit knowledge

Briefly define the tacit/explicit knowledge distinction. What kinds of tacit / explicit knowledge will you need to store for your web 2.0 business plan? What will be your strategy for managing the knowledge(refer to article)?

Knowledge management is an important, yet difficult task for any organization. In order to ensure that your company stays relevant and ahead of the competition, a significant investment must be made in data analytics and knowledge creation. However, before any organization takes the steps to collect, store, manage, and analyze data, they must first understand the different types of knowledge available.

According to Professor Nonaka’s Knowledge Creation Framework, “The interactions between the explicit and tacit knowledge lead to the creation of new knowledge.” Though both are crucial to understanding any process or ideation, explicit and tacit knowledge are two very different forms of learning, and combined they can create extremely valuable data. Most of us have become quite familiar with the concept of explicit knowledge. Throughout our education, we are taught that knowledge comes from recorded materials such as books, documents, and databases. However, arguably the most insightful types of knowledge cannot be found in such reports, but are rather gained from personal actions and experiences. Tacit knowledge is implied and difficult to formalize or communicate to others. These insights are typically the most difficult to explain but crucial to development.

Our Web 2.0 will need to store both explicit and implicit knowledge in order to succeed. Explicit data will be the backbone to our mobile application. We want our site to be the most efficient resource for students to obtain relevant information on the university’s RSOs. In order to do so, our data management systems will need to store documented and measurable information, such as the names and members of RSOs, event dates, emails, and other contact information. This information will be useful in statistical reports and projections for our application. However, a great deal of tacit knowledge will also be needed in order four our business plan to effective. For instance, it is extremely difficult to categorize the various types and functions of the RSOs on campus. While we can do our best to organize the RSOs by categories such as professional, recreational, and social organizations, expressing the many different cultures, functions, and images each RSO will be fairly difficult. Most of this information will come from the personal experiences of the students involved. Furthermore, the tacit knowledge gained from users will be crucial in the development of our application’s software. We need to stay up to date on consumer expectations, as well as the latest and most desired Web 2.0 features.

We will use a both codification and personalization strategies in order to manage the knowledge created from our business. The codification process should be quite simple, for we will use data management systems to code, store, and interpret the explicit information entered by users. The personalization process, on the other hand, could prove to be fairly difficult, since there is no formal way to create tacit knowledge. To aid our efforts, however, we hope to implement various opportunities for users to share their opinions feedback, with the use of surveys, rating systems, and open forums.