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• Protect people ’ s privacy.
• Create a bridge to organizational memory for long-term retention of the valuable
content.

Practical Implications of Knowledge Capture and Codifi cation

While the benefi ts of capturing tacit knowledge and codifying explicit knowledge are
obvious to organizations, they can be fairly vague at the level of the individual knowl-
edge worker. The prevalence of the “ knowledge is power ” paradigm makes it diffi cult
to “ sell ” employees on the importance of having their knowledge retained by the
organization as a future hedge for when they are no longer working there. Knowledge
is a curious asset — one that cannot be owned but merely borrowed or rented. Some
knowledge remains within the organization when employees leave but this needs to
be the “ right ” kind of knowledge and workers will need to be able to access and make
use of it.
A number of recommendations include:
Acknowledge knowledge contributors Turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge
is diffi cult for many users and often faces resistance, despite the obvious benefi ts.
Acknowledge workers who not only create original content, but also help improve the
content over time by adding additional context from customer interactions. KM soft-
ware should offer reports to identify those who are contributing, or help to tap the
tacit knowledge by building profi les of experts based on their contributions.
Remember to forget The role of unlearning or reframing cannot be emphasized enough
(e.g., Fiol and Lyles 1985 ). The organizational knowledge base should not be viewed
as unlimited storage space to be fi lled. While there may not be any technological
constraints, there are certainly conceptual constraints to take into consideration.
Unlearning involves disposing of old frameworks and breaking away from the status
quo — a form of double loop learning. Van de Ven and Polley (1992) suggest that the
type of unlearning that involves responses to mistakes and failures can play an impor-
tant role in knowledge acquisition and deployment — if they are viewed as learning
opportunities. As Edison put it: “ I have not failed. I ’ ve just found 10,000 ways that
won ’ t work ” (Thomas A. Edison, as quoted in The World Book Encyclopedia (1993) Vol.
E, p. 78).
Do not spill any knowledge during transfer Conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit
knowledge must be accomplished without signifi cant loss of knowledge (e.g., Brown
and Duguid 2000 ). The advantages of communicability do not always outweigh the