Tap the Tacit Knowledge

Tacit knowledge is the significant information that resides in an individual’s mind. Tacit knowledge is difficult to track and capture as it is not written down. It is simply the knowledge, someone has gathered from experience. It is unseen and thus often untapped. But it is a treasure pyramid of knowledge.

Much of the learning can happen by way of learning from the experts and experienced professionals. Organizations that can identify and connect experts, who can share their tacit knowledge benefit by providing higher quality solutions, grow faster. However, such tacit knowledge sharing is typically unstructured and does not provide ways to measure the expanse of the knowledge. Capturing the tacit knowledge of individuals is perhaps one of the biggest challenges in knowledge management.

So, how to tap the tacit knowledge?

Carrying informal discussions into a collaborative environment is an ideal way to begin. It replaces off-the-cuff interactions like shouting over the cubicle and blasting email threads with a single, well-structured place where people can collaborate, that may extend to customers and partners.

In a corporate scenario, where employees can come together, collaborate, share and learn from each other on job-related skills or product and service functions, collaboration with the experience and expert people who have been in the job function for several years is very important. Also, while a standard training program or on the job training does provide for the initial training that is required to perform a job function, the expertise of the experienced professionals in that function can enable one to learn the nuances associated with a job function. So, expertise management becomes a central ideology of tacit knowledge.

Organization should provide such a platform which should enable people to share information about a current issue, problem, or any relevant query with knowledge veterans. Organizations, by automatically capturing these interactions, can expand the scope of reusable knowledge to include various silos data, by recording, documenting, and storing for future reference.

In many situations, even, within a professional community or an organization, we see lack of motivation for the experts to spend time in sharing their knowledge with the inexperienced. So, it is also important to provide recognition and encouragement to the expert contributions by tracking and measuring such contributions, thereby motivating them to share their expertise.

Click at http://www.infoprolearning.com/gnosis/ to know more.

Dip into the pool of Social Learning

Social media technologies have ushered a new era in the learning industry. In recent years, organizations of all sizes have started using social media technologies both internally and externally. External usages are for marketing, customer support, and many other uses and internally social media technologies are used to increase collaboration, communication, informal learning, and ultimately, business success.

The technologies differ depending on business needs and availability, but usually include some combination of blogs, forums, social networking, micro-messaging, social bookmarking, podcasting, video-sharing etc.

There are many ways to leverage from the Social learning within an organization:

• Encourage collaborative learning by linking your social learning tool or platform with your intranet portals, your Learning Management System, and so on. Linking to and from related e-Learning courses can be a just right way to supplement your existing formal learning content.

• Persuade people to regularly visit, post, involve, discuss in the forum
• Get relevant leaders in the organization involve in promoting the forum by sharing their thoughts, speaking and advising from their experience and expertise. Encouraging Thought Leadership can help the organization tap into the tacit knowledge
• If there is a great discussion at the forum or if someone gives a real good idea or excellent answer to any question, let the senior management pick and highlight that to encourage people to use it
• Enable newcomers to learn together by collaborating with each other and asking questions to the key veterans, or the subject matter experts

So, translate Organizational Knowledge into Organized Wisdom through social collaborative learning.

Click at http://www.infoprolearning.com/gnosis/ to know more.