All entries for Tuesday 05 June 2012

What a difficult task to transfer tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge

What a difficult task to transfer tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge. Well, reading today an author (Liebowitz,1999) he claims that the more expert one is, the harder it is to extract this knowledge and formalize it in a knowledge repository. Knowing this sort of conclusions, it makes me think how hard will be to get this knowledge from such experts, as soon as we head our first job.

However, for sure there is a possibility to do it, coming back to my former experience, I had to run a process, which was all about to gather tacit knowledge and transforming in explicit. I was devoted to such task by production director, perhaps because he noticed during meetings everyday the huge amount of knowledge from one of his engineers in terms of how to repair heating resistors of each mold (more than 500) in injection molding process. Believe or not, this process was not on paper, so the decision of which resistor might be suitable for the mold to repair, was made by this engineer who manage the process for almost 12 years.

Well, it was a big company, but this particular task which should have been done ages ago, it was delivered for him and myself.

The key of this story was, I could get all information from his experience which I will say, it was easy but I am aware of sometimes the expert will not keen to provide the information. Anyway, I am giving you guys, that its very common to find this sort of situations within companies, and definitely our task will be to update the knowledge from our own job or from a different worker in the company.

Johnnatan Escobar Posada : 05 Jun 2012 20:17 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem