This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Ashvil.
Original Post: Capturing Tacit Knowledge
Feed Title: Ashvil's Blog
Feed URL: http://ashvil.net/cs/blogs/blog/rss.aspx
Feed Description: Notes from the software world
Peter Donker has a good article on the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge denotes the knowledge embedded in artefacts such as documents and databases. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge in people’s heads.The usefulness in this distinction lies in the fact that explicit knowledge is easily duplicated and distributed while tacit knowledge is not.
My vision behind Context based communication was to capture tacit knowledge during the communication process.
The best way to explain this is to use the bug/issue tracker example. When Mark, an account manager files a bug, the bug is assigned to a developer, Jill. Any communication between Mark and Jill is either through comments in the bug tracker (inside the system in a constrained fashion) or via email/phone/IM in an free form fashion.
When Mark and Jill directly communicate outside the system, they are more productive but this information is lost even though there is context around the bug that they are discussing. Imagine now, if this information could be captured, indexed and sent back to the bug tracking system. You suddenly have information that was otherwise lost and transparently captured this during the communication process. Imagine this being done for all our business communication across differently applications.
Tacit knowledge flows out of people during the communication process and capturing transparently is a key to building great knowledge management systems. We did implement a little bit of this vision at i3Connect as this case study demonstrates.
Previous Topic
