Course: 0224M - Knowledge Management

Knowledge Capture and

Codification
Week 3
 If written directions alone would suffice,
libraries wouldn’t need to have the rest of
the universities attached.

Judith Martin (1938–) Washington Post

columnist and author

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 Learning Outcomes
• Become familiar with the basic terminology and concepts related to
knowledge capture and codification.
• Describe the major technique used to elicit tacit knowledge from
subject matter expert.
• Define the major roles and responsibilities that come into play
during the knowledge capture and codification phase.
• Outline the general taxonomic approach used in classifying
knowledge that has been captured

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 Acknowledgement
These slides have been adapted from
Dalkir, K. (2011). Knowledge
Management in Theory and Practice.
The MIR Press. USA. ISBN: 978-
0262015080. (Chapter 4)

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 Sub Topics
• Tacit Knowledge Capture at the Individual and Group Level
• Explicit Knowledge codification
• Cognitive Maps
• Decision Trees
• Knowledge Taxonomies
• The relationship among KM, Competitive Intelligence,
Business Intelligence, and Strategic Intelligence

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 Introduction
• This topic addresses the first phase of the knowledge management cycle,
knowledge capture and/or creation.
• The major approaches, techniques, and tools used to elicit tacit
knowledge, to trigger the creation of new knowledge, and to
subsequently organize this content in a systematic manner (codification)
are presented.
• The first high-level phase of the knowledge management cycle, as seen in
Figure on the next slide, begins with knowledge capture and codification.
• More specifically, tacit knowledge is captured or elicited, and explicit
knowledge is organized or coded.

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 Introduction (Cont.)

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 Introduction (Cont.)
• In knowledge capture, a distinction needs to be made
between the capture or identification of existing knowledge
and the creation of new knowledge.
• In knowledge management, we need to also consider
knowledge that we know is present in the organization, which
we can then set out to capture.

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 Introduction (Cont.)
• We will need to facilitate the creation of the new and
innovative content (Refer to figure below)

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Source: Frappaolo, 2004
 Introduction (Cont.)
• Capturing the knowledge in an organization is not purely
about technology.
• Indeed, many firms find that IT plays only a small part in
ensuring that information is available to those who need it.
• The approach needed depends on the kind of business, its
culture, and the ways in which people solve problems.

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 Introduction (Cont.)

• Knowledge capture cannot therefore be a purely mechanistic

“add-on” because it has to do with the discovery,
organization, and integration of knowledge into the “fabric”
of the organization.
• Knowledge has to be captured and codified in such a way that
it can become a part of the existing knowledge base of the
organization.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture
• Learning at the individual level, however, is widely accepted to be a
fundamentally social process—something that cannot occur without some
form of group interaction.
• Individuals thus learn from the collective, and at the same time the collective
learns from individuals.
• According to Crossan’s 4I model (see Figure on the next slide), organizational
learning involves a tension between assimilating new learning (exploration)
and using what has been learned (exploitation).
• Individual, group, and organizational levels of learning are linked by the social
and psychological processes of intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and
institutionalizing (the four I’s).

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture (Cont.)

Source: Crossan, Lane, and White, 1999.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture (Cont.)
• In KM, this knowledge creation or capture may be done by individuals
who work for the organization or a group within that organization, by all
members of a community of practice (CoP), or by a dedicated CoP
individual.
• It is really done on a personal level as well, for almost everyone performs
some knowledge creation, capture, and codification activities in carrying
out their job. Cope (2000) refers to this as PKM (personalized KM).
• Many of the tacit knowledge capture techniques described in this topic
derive from techniques that were originally used in artificial intelligence—
more specifically, in the development of expert systems.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels

• Knowledge acquisition from individuals or groups can be

characterized as the transfer and transformation of valuable
expertise from a knowledge source (e.g., human expert,
documents) to a knowledge repository (e.g., corporate
memory, intranet).

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
The approach used to capture, describe, and subsequently
code knowledge depends on the type of knowledge:
• Explicit knowledge is already well described, but we may
need to abstract or summarize this content.
• Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, may require much more
significant up-front analysis and organization before it can be
suitably described and represented.
The ways in which we can tackle tacit knowledge range from
simple graphical representations
to sophisticated mathematical formulations.
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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)

In the design and development of knowledge-based systems, or

expert systems, knowledge engineers interviewed subject
matter experts, produced a conceptual model of their critical
knowledge, and then “translated” this model into a
computer-executable model such that an “expert on a
diskette” resulted
(e.g., Hayes-Roth, Waterman and Lenat, 1983)

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
Procedural Knowledge and Declarative Knowledge
• Procedural knowledge is knowledge of how to do things, how to
make decisions, how to diagnose, and how to prescribe.
• Declarative knowledge, denotes descriptive knowledge or knowing
“what” as opposed to knowing “how.”
• It soon became apparent that certain types of content were easily
extracted and modeled in this manner—anything that was similar
to an interactive online manual or help function in such fields as
engineering, manufacturing, decision support, and medicine.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
• The interactions with subject matter experts that were needed to render
tacit knowledge explicit made up the knowledge engineer’s toolkit.
• Quite a few of these techniques are imminently relevant and applicable
to the process of tacit knowledge capture in knowledge management
applications.
The major tasks carried out by knowledge engineers included:
• Analyzing information and knowledge flow.
• Working with experts to obtain information.
• Designing and implementing an expert system.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
Only the last point would differ, and it could be replaced by
“designing and implementing a knowledge management system or
knowledge repository.”

On the other side were the subject matter experts, and they had
to be able to:
• Explain important knowledge and know-how.
• Be introspective and patient.
• Have effective communication skills

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
• Another artificial intelligence researcher, Parsaye (1988),
outlined the following three major approaches to knowledge
acquisition from individuals and groups:
1. Interviewing experts.
2. Learning by being told.
3. Learning by observation.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
Other Methods of Tacit Knowledge Capture
A number of other techniques may be used to capture tacit knowledge from
individuals and from groups, including:
• Ad hoc sessions.
• Road maps.
• Learning histories.
• Action learning.
• E-learning.
• Learning from others through business guest speakers and benchmarking
against best practices.

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 Key Knowledge Acquisition Phases

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
• Organizational knowledge acquisition is a qualitatively
different process from that which occurs at individual and
group levels.

• Whereas at the group level they are primarily concerned with

identifying and coding valuable knowledge, which is mostly
tacit in nature, organizational knowledge capture takes place
on a more macro level.

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 Tacit Knowledge Capture at Individual and
Group Levels (Cont.)
A good approach is proposed by Malhotra (2000), who
outlines four major organizational knowledge acquisition
processes:
(1) Grafting,
(2) Vicarious learning,
(3) Experiential learning,
(4) Inferential processes.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification
• Knowledge can be shared through personal communication and interaction,
as we saw in the first quadrant, socialization, of the Nonaka and Takeuchi KM
model.

• This occurs naturally all the time and is very effective, though rarely is it cost-
effective.

• Knowledge codification is the next stage of leveraging knowledge. By

converting knowledge into a tangible, explicit form such as a document, that
knowledge can be communicated much more widely and with less cost.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)
• Interaction is limited in scope to those within hearing or able to have
face-to-face contact.

• Documents can be disseminated widely over a corporate intranet,

and they persist over time, which makes them available for reference
as and when they are needed, both by existing and by future staff.

• They constitute the only “real” corporate memory of the organization

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

There are, of course, costs and difficulties associated with

knowledge codification. The first issue is that of quality, which
encompasses :
(1)Accuracy,
(2)Readability/understandability,
(3)Accessibility,
(4)Currency,
(5)Authority/credibility.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

The codification of explicit knowledge can be achieved

through a variety of techniques such as
• Cognitive mapping,
• Decision trees,
• Knowledge taxonomies,
• Task analysis.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)
Cognitive Maps

– Cognitive /knowledge map is a representation of the “mental

model” of a person’s knowledge and provides a good form of
codified knowledge.
– A mental model is how human minds process and make
sense of their complex environment.
– Cognitive map is a powerful way of coding this captured
knowledge because it also captures the context and the
complex interrelationships between the different key concepts

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)
• EXAMPLE OF A CONCEPT MAP

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)
• Another widely used tool for explicit knowledge coding is the
Common- KADS methodology (Schreiber et al., 2000; Shadbolt,
O’Hara, and Crow, 1999), which is a knowledge engineering
methodology centered on six models of an organization:
1. Task model of the organization’s business processes.
2. Agent model of the executors’ use of knowledge, both human and
artificial, to carry out the various tasks in the organization,
3. Knowledge model that explains in detail the knowledge structures
and types required for performing tasks,
4. Communication model that models the communicative transactions
between agents,
5. Design model that specifies the architectures and technical
requirements needed to implement a system that embodies the
functions detailed by the knowledge and communication models.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

• Decision Trees
– The decision tree is typically in the form of a
flowchart, with alternate paths indicating the impact of
different decisions being made at the juncture point.
– The decision tree is typically in the form of a
flowchart, with alternate paths indicating the impact of
different decisions being made at that juncture point.
– The graphic nature makes them very easy to
understand, and they are obviously very well suited
for the coding of process knowledge.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)
Example of A Decision Tree

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

• Knowledge Taxonomies
– Concepts can be viewed as the building blocks of
knowledge and expertise.
– Knowledge taxonomies allow knowledge to be
graphically represented in such a way that it reflects
the organization of concepts within a particular field of
expertise or for the organization at large.
– Taxonomies are basic classification systems that
enable us to describe concepts and their
dependencies typically in a hierarchical fashion.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

• Knowledge Taxonomies
– Each node is a subgroup of the node above it, which
means that all of the properties of the higher level
node are automatically transferred from “parent” to
“child”.

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)
Example of a Knowledge Taxonomy

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

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 Explicit Knowledge Codification (Cont.)

• Recommendations for promoting knowledge

capture and codification follow:
(1) Acknowledge knowledge contributors,
(2) Remember to forget,
(3) Don’t spill any knowledge during transfer,
(4) Remember the paradox of knowledge value.

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 The Relationships among KM, Competitive
Intelligence, Business Intelligence, and
Strategic Intelligence
• KM has historically focused on capturing knowledge from
within the organization and from past events in the History of
the organization, while compeitive intelligence (CI) has
tradionally focused on external resources.
• Competitive Intelligence can be defined as “Systematic and
ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing
external information that can effect your company’s plans,
decisions, and operations” (SCIP, http://www.scip.org)

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 The Relationships among KM, Competitive
Intelligence, Business Intelligence, and
Strategic Intelligence (Cont.)
• KM and CI are concerned with “Strategic Intelligence”, that is
information resources that are needed for decision making,
which turn benefits, the company.
• Business Intelligence (BI) is often used as a synonym for CI, but
really refers to the set of tools that allow information to be
gathered and used for not only CI but also for:
- Customer profiling
- Market research
- And the other analyses
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