How to Get the Most Out of



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Spider’s Web


A term coined by James Brian Quinn, Philip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein61. When a company encounters complex, poorly defined problems, no one person may know how to solve them. A self organizing network or spider’s web comes in handy in such cases. Such a web quickly brings people together to solve a problem and then disbands just as quickly once the job is done. Research reveals that even with 8-10 collaborating independent professionals, a spider’s web can leverage knowledge capabilities by hundreds of times. Spider’s webs are particularly appropriate when knowledge is dispersed among many specialists who must come together to solve a different problem. Consulting firms, investment banks, research consortia and medical diagnostic teams have been known to use spider’s webs.

(See also: Collaboration Work)

Storytelling


The use of stories in organizations as a way of sharing knowledge and helping learning. Stories can be very powerful communication tools, and may be used to describe complex issues, explain events, communicate lessons learned, or bring about cultural change. Stories preserve the rich context that gets lost if attempts are made to cram information into rigidly defined templates. Unfortunately, many organizations do not pay adequate attention to this important method of knowledge sharing.

Structural Capital


A form of Intellectual Capital that remains with the firm, not individual employees. It includes the explicit rule-based knowledge embedded in the organization’s work processes and systems, or encoded in written policies. It also includes training documentation or best practices databases.

Summarization


Process, and technology for summarizing key points. Long documents are cumbersome and unwieldy. Fortunately, today, technology is available for summarizing documents. Typically, all the key points in a large document can be summarized in less than twenty per cent of its original size using such technology. If not anything else, a summary enables users to avoid reading irrelevant documents. Commercially available summarizers use the sentence selection method, preparing a summary from what are judged to be the key sentences in a document.

Systems Thinking


A philosophy that emphasizes the importance of looking at a problem holistically. It is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that have been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to make it possible to bring about effective change with the least amount of effort by finding the leverage points in a system.

(See also: Learning organization)

T

Tacit Knowledge


Knowledge or know-how that people carry in their heads including subjective intuitions and hunches. Such knowledge is not easily visible and expressible. As it is highly personal and hard to formalize, tacit knowledge is difficult to communicate or share with others. There are two dimensions of tacit knowledge. The technical dimension refers to the skills developed over time. The second dimension is cognitive, consisting of beliefs, perceptions, ideas, values, emotions and mental models so ingrained in us that we take them for granted.

Personal, context specific knowledge is difficult to formalize, articulate or record. It is developed through trial and error and best transferred through doing and observing. Observation, mentoring, storytelling, discussions, dialogues and project based learning are some of the tools available to transfer tacit knowledge. Such knowledge is difficult to pass on through the use of information technology. Because tacit knowledge is difficult to document and replicate, it is often the most valuable form of knowledge.

Some authors draw a distinction between tacit and implicit knowledge, defining tacit knowledge as that which cannot be written down, and implicit knowledge as that which can be written down but has not been written down yet. In this context, explicit knowledge refers to knowledge which has already been written down.

(See also: Socialization, SECI Model)

Tag


A keyword which acts like a subject or category, to organize webpages and objects on the Internet. Tags are used to find or organize objects with similar properties. Each user “tags” a webpage or image using his or her own unique tag.

Tags can also be used to specify properties of an object that are not obvious to the object itself. Attribute tag searching works by using tags that define concepts not inherently captured in the content of the
document. A tag can have a brief description of the business activity, the domain, the formal / physical representation of the knowledge, type of document, product / service to which it relates, time of creation of the document and the location of the knowledge element.


An image or webpage may have multiple tags that identify it. Webpages and images with identical tags are then linked together. Users may use the tag to search for similar webpages and images. Tags are used in markup languages (HTML and XML). Tagging content is an integral part of Content Management Systems.

Takeuchi, Hirotaka


Dean of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, Takeuchi has done extensive research on the knowledge creation process within organizations, competitiveness of Japanese firms in global industries, new product development, and international corporate strategy. An April 1996 Fortune article introduced him as “among the intellectual leaders of the younger, globally-minded generation that is coming to power in Japan.” His book, The Knowledge-Creating Company, coauthored with Ikujiro Nonaka, is probably the most acclaimed book on knowledge management.


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