Gathering knowledge

• Record the 'best' solutions to commom problems and issues
• Construct an ontology / taxonomy, identify gaps and seek expertise to fill them
• Encourage collection, indexing and distribution of best practices and lessons learned
• Conduct formal After Action Reviews (AARs), encourage periodic reflections, craft patterns top collect solutions that work from experience
• Knowledge Harvesting ( Capturing and transferring vital know-how )
• Set up a question driven community

Knowledge management

1- Socialization (the conversion of tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge)

Making a positive social interaction culture for sharing knowledge

• Build a climate of trust, cooperation, and support. A few people hoarding information
  inhibit organisational performance.


• Align performance assessment and compensation to encourage a sharing environment.


• Organize a support system for new employees so they participate in the sharing
  processes. Mentors need to demonstrate and reinforce the positive virtues of sharing
  knowledge.

Find out the actual strategy of the firm

• Create knowledge maps ( to find the relevant pieces of knowledge )


• Find the experts in the organization


• Encourage seminars, discussions and work-out to find know-how methods, specific knowledge,share experience in order to generate the best option and best practices.


• “talk rooms” to encourage unpredictable and creative knowledge exchange. No
  meetings are held in the talk rooms, there are no organized discussions either. The expectation of these rooms is that employees will chat about their current work with whomever they find and that these conversations will create values for the firm.


• Corporate picnics provide opportunities for exchange between employees who never get to talk to each other in their daily work.

2- Externalization (the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge)

Most tacit knowledge can be codified, for example, as best practices, manuals and other kinds of
documents.

• Codification in organizations converts knowledge into accessible
  and applicable formats for those who need it. New technologies play an important role in
  knowledge codification


• Managers must decide what business goals the codified knowledge will serve.


• Managers must be able to identify knowledge existing in various forms appropriate
  to reaching those goals.


• Knowledge managers must evaluate knowledge for usefulness and appropriateness
  for codification (the problem of possibility to codify tacit knowledge can be solved
  here)


• Codifiers must identify an appropriate medium for codification and distribution
  (the problem of spreading to competitors can be avoided by this)

3- Combination (the conversion of explicit knowledge to explicit knowledge)



4- Internalization (the conversion of explicit to tacit knowledge)


For transferring explicit knowledge different information communication
technologies can be used: Intranets, Lotus Notes, data warehouses and GroupWise,
etc. These technologies help to store, share and transfer information saving time and overcoming
geographical boundaries, since the access to information is possible all the time
(Davenport & Prusak, 1998).


The software can be used to identify, acquire, and codify
knowledge and makes it accessible for a wide range of users.