“How much I know and how much we know”

To make plans work and achieve some degree of KM facilitation within the organizations, organisations start with low hanging fruit of Explicit Knowledge and this makes sense too as organizations know where to extent their resources, human capital and technology, to capture the same.

While working on the knowledge paradigm one of the challenges posed to organizations is how to articulate the tacit knowledge of the employee and put to use.

During the start of this century few researchers like Castillo, Ambrosini and Bowman started classifying implicit knowledge in three formats. The first level of tacit knowledge, “Deeply Ingrained”, which cannot be articulated, as this nonepistle tacit knowledge is extremely difficult to be “explicitly articulated”, which was earlier said by Leonard & Sensiper. The second level of tacit, which has termed as “sagacious”, “imperfectly articulated tacit skills” or “cognitive form of tacit knowledge by various KM thought leaders. Ambrosini and Bowman acknowledge Nonaka view that this knowledge can be partially captured through “metaphor and analogy”. The third level, Semantic Knowledge by Castillo and Internalised Knowledge by Nonaka which was at one time explicit and has been turned into implicit and Ambrosini & Bowman Castillo and Nonaka, agree this can be articulated relatively easily through dialogue.

“How much we know”, has always been a matter of concern for almost all the organizations. The collective tacit knowledge has been interpreted very differently by organizations and instead of coming out with the clear description many researchers in this field has only added to the confusion.

Spendor’s research says that collective knowledge is more secure and has more strategic significance than individual knowledge. Few likes of Fahey and Prusak, it is less changeable and least affected by attrition

Questions have been raised whether there is a difference between collective and total sum of knowledge being held by all individuals in the system. Thought leaders like Simon clearly stated that, organisation do not hold any knowledge but its members do. But researchers like Nelson and Winter who put forward a different perspective to collective knowledge and said “…an attribute of the organisation just like its modus operandi and culture” as referred by Alton in his paper

My thoughts differ from the school of researchers and authors who believe that Collective knowledge is not aggregation of knowledge held by individuals in organisation.

To begin with we can say that collective knowledge is the complete knowledge, including explicit and implicit, which resides with the employees of organisation.

Again the collective knowledge can be classified into collective explicit and collective implicit knowledge. The collective explicit knowledge which has been termed as encoded knowledge by some and few have termed it as objectified knowledge is said to be easily accessible & transferred among employees as the same can be stored. Collective implicit knowledge which is formed by explicit and implicit knowledge of the group has been called as tacit routines by Ambrosini, embedded knowledge by Blackler and Lam and socio cultural knowledge by Castillo and collective knowledge by Spender. It is understood that the objective of implicit is to allow users to grow but not to replace their thinking.

Collective implicit knowledge, which can be articulated and but due to constraints cannot be stored hence is only available as an implicit knowledge to a group. This availability depends how well a “seeker” is connected and knows the “knowledge holder”.

Blackler distinguishes a further subset of collective knowledge. In his study in mid 90s, “Knowledge, Knowledge Work and Organizations: An Overview and Interpretation, Organizational Studies”, expanded the knowledge types which were proposed by Collins earlier in the decade, viz.

1. Embrained knowledge is dependent on conceptual skills and cognitive abilities. It more of 'knowing that' than ‘knowing how’. It required synthesizing personal insights models, system thinking and have shared visions of organizational learning
This knowledge is considered to be highly practical, high-level knowledge, where objectives are met through perpetual recognition and revamping. Tacit knowledge may also be embrained, even though it is mainly subconscious.

2. Embodied knowledge is action oriented and consists of contextual practices. It more of ‘knowing how’ and social acquisition. This tacit knowledge is formed by interaction among individuals and how they interpret their environment.

3. Encultured knowledge is the process of achieving shared understandings through socialization and acculturation, which refers specifically to the knowledge that individuals hold about the cultural or social norms regarding how to behave or interact with others in the group in specific situations. This type of tacit knowledge in an enterprise is represented in practices and language.

4. Embedded knowledge is explicit and resides within systematic routines and maybe ritualized. It relates to the relationships between roles, technologies, formal procedures and emergent routines within a complex system.

5. Encoded knowledge is information that is conveyed in signs and symbols and represented textually and digitally. This knowledge is decontextualized and abstract. Rather than being a specific type of knowledge, it deals more with the transmission, storage and interrogation of knowledge.