Anthropology & Knowledge Codification

Page 4 of 15

'y

understand the culture, knowledge, intellectual capital, and work practices of an organization and then use these insights to help the organization transform itself into what it wants to be audit human capital, knowledge, time, or attention assess an organization's knowledge and learning behaviors and needs in order to develop a strategy or plan for fulfilling its unmet needs determine what tools people actually use to do their work and how - helps KM (Knowledge Management) & IT select, improve, and train on tools go into the workplace to engage workers in diagnosing problems and introducing selective interventions to bring about desired improvements in the behavior of the organization without typical resistance to change- what we call Ethnovention, our enhanced equivalent of Sol Tax's action anthropology track the impact rippling through the organization of a leader's decision or actionwhat we call Mirror Coaching observe the interactions of a community or other work group in physical and/or virtual space (includin virtual communities on the internet) and then work with them to enhance their sense of community an< the quality of their interactions and outcomes convert intangible intellectual assets into a more tangible form, such as codifying the tacit knowledge of an individual or group.

,_ ;..-

';;-

'y

'r

';-

>

There are other ways to do such things as behavioral and cultural research and needs assessment, for which we employ ethnography. But we have found that the results aren't as detailed or accurate, or take far longer and cost much more to obtain, or both. For example, a few years ago a study was completed of the knowledge management behaviors of engineers and scientists in the large commercial aircraft industry. It focused on the same type of population and subjects and produced similar findings to an ethnographic study we did inside a large aerospace company, discussed later. But we did our ethnographic study in 6 weeks wit) one full-time and two part-time ethnographers while the other study took 10 years and involved surveying or interviewing 15,000 engineers and scientists. Ethnography can't do everything, but it is definitely the best tool we know for what it's intended to do. For example, we have found that ethnography is a very valuable tool to use throughout the entire life cycle of knowledge codification. Here is how it has helped us and our clients in various aspects of knowledge codification. What is Codification? The typical views of codification are that it is the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge (from a knowledge management point of view), undocumented to documented information (from an information management point of view), or human capital to structural capital (from an intellectual capital point of view) Further, the typical view is that these conversions are something organizations should strive to do - i.e., that this conversion process is a significant part of what knowledge, information, or intellectual capital management should be focused on. We don't subscribe to any of these points of view. First, as Karl-Erik Sveiby points out, tacit knowledge doesn't represent all of the knowledge that exists in people's heads. He says that, according to the principles of epistemology (the study of knowledge), tacit knowledge is unconscious; i.e., it is the knowledge we have stored in the unconscious part of our brains. The knowledge that is stored in our conscious mind consists of just data/information (he doesn't differentiate these), or in other words, facts (justified true belief). Part of the value of our tacit or unconscious knowledge

http://www.workfrontiers.com/Anthropology.htm

20/10/2001