And the Oscar is…

Truthfully, I have no idea.  I’m just using that title because my wife purchased an ‘Oscar-palooza’ package from the movie theater, so for the next week or so, we get to watch all the Oscar candidate movies.  That will probably be something like 1.67 movies a day.  Phew!  Therefore, I need to get this post out there before the big adventure starts.  One of the big movie candidates this season is ‘Dunkirk’.  The protagonists are an amalgamation of people and the movie presents the drama from multiple points of view (pretty similar to Rashomon (see earlier post);  not unlike this class on Knowledge Management.  As a theme, I’ll try that technique in this post.

Kothari, et al., writes about the amount of tacit knowledge that is used by health practitioners in making decisions about public health programs and in driving them forward.  Based on their experience, some things will work better than others.  Some people will be more committed to the success of the program and some donors will be more (or less) engaged.  There is a set of politics involved as well; one does not want to anger the donors and risk the funding by treading in the wrong place.  The conclusion that “careful attention to the importance and influence of tacit knowledge in program planning is needed” seems obvious in hindsight, yet it is instructive to have it proven out as they do in the paper.  What was obvious to me – the practitioner’s years of practice and experience – was not the only tacit knowledge aspect.

First, explicit knowledge is not always available in public health to guide program planning. Second, in some areas explicit knowledge is available but is not used. Third, explicit knowledge may not take into consideration the local context in which public health units are situated. Fourth, the practitioners who carry out public health program planning and implementation are experts in their fields. They described tapping into the tacit knowledge and expertise they had accumulated through years of practice. This included their own tacit knowledge, as well as that of their team members and community partners.

While perhaps I should have foreseen the first item, the second and third were a surprise.  So how could a public health organization (or any organization, for that matter) improve their information and the usage?  If you focus on organizational knowledge management, what happens?

Which brings us to Bharati, et al., who have a model, hypotheses, and managed to conduct a cross-sectional study of nearly 300 respondents, varying ages, experience, and industries (‘verticals’ in industry parlance).  They sought to address the question, when you focus on KM (knowledge management), do you just get more information or is it somehow better?  I was immediately suspicious of the term “better”.

The authors define organizational knowledge quality as the extent to which the precision and accuracy of the knowledge acquired by an organization meets the organization’s knowledge need.

Okay, I can work with that.  They hypothesize that “a higher level of organizational emphasis on knowledge management is associated with a higher level of organizational knowledge quality”. As it turns out, that’s true.  Many organizations worry that focusing on knowledge will merely increase the inventory of knowledge but not the quality (as defined previously).  And social media can allow user-generated content to accumulate endlessly, which exacerbates the problem of finding that one item of information one is searching for.  The study shows

“that organizational processes and practices that enhance quality knowledge gathering and utilization should work in concert with, rather than [be] solely reliant on, social media technologies”.

Intriguing – the first article talks about tacit knowledge and that it should be leveraged more thoroughly in program planning, the second article studies what happens when an organization focuses on knowledge.

The third article, by Schultze (2000), “A Confessional Account Of An Ethnography About Knowledge Work” is an interesting self-reflection that touches on the idea of recognizing tacit knowledge as a third party, disinterested observer.  That in the end the author becomes increasingly part of the team, risking her ‘disinterested’ 3rd party status but gaining an identity as a “competent self” within the team, only strengthens her conclusions regarding the utility of anonymity in knowledge management technologies and activities.  People crave (my words, not hers) the brand that comes with sharing intangible information because of the personal benefits such as “heightened self-esteem and pride, increased self-efficacy, increased personal identification with coworkers. more respect from others and a better reputation, and reduced alienation or stronger feelings of commitment”.

Three different views of tacit knowledge at work – an increased recognition that it should be accounted for and leveraged more heavily in planning programs, an in-depth study of how it works inside organizations, and a reflection on one’s own tacit knowledge and beliefs reflects on one’s self-esteem (I’m struggling to put a bit of Polanyi into this; it’s a stretch so work with me here). As Schultze points out, “It suggests that a knowledge management system needs to help individuals objectify their subjective knowledge”.  (See similar ideas from Carolyne Millsap and Wil Silberman).  Which would take us back to Bharati and Kothari. Hmm.

Bibliography:

Bharati, P., Zhang, W. & Chaudhury, A. (2015). Better knowledge with social media? Exploring the roles of social capital and organizational knowledge management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 19 , 456-475. doi: 10.1108/JKM-11-2014-0467

Kothari, A., Rudman, D., Dobbins, M., Rouse, M., Sibbald, S. & Edwards, N. (2012). The use of tacit and explicit knowledge in public health: a qualitative study. Implementation Science, 7. doi: doi:10.1186/1748-5908-7-20

Schultze, U. (2000). A Confessional Account of an Ethnography about Knowledge Work. MIS Quarterly, 24, 3–41. doi: 10.2307/3250978