All entries for July 2014

Can PDSA help Tacit to Explicit?

The act of doing a Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle - is in someways turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge I believe, and it's an even more simple and useful way to do so.

The act of planning is already exercising your tacit knowledge, making your skills that you are good at such as your technical skills into use. Now i'm uncertain if this is just tacit-tacit or tacit-explicit, because the tacit knowledge that you have is turning into something tha'ts more physical form, with planning possibly being something you write or document to prepare yourself.

For 'Do' you have to make sure that the actions you take are based on what you plan, and this can come in many form, but essentially this can have 2 effects accroding to Nonaka's model:

1. Tacit - Tacit: because others observe what you do and learn from that

2. Explicit - this might depend on what you choose to do - if it's creating conceptual ideas and spreading it out to use with others - such as if what you planned was think of metaphors, do would be deploying it

'Study' - is where you can take the results and analyse it, which can be something like turnig explicit into explicit or explicit into tacit.

Lastly, 'act' can be when you decide to fully initiate the planned and tested solution, and ensure that this restarts again - to continuously improve - just like what the purpose of the sprial of knowlege is for - to continuously improve at a deeper level.

This is quite interesting and it just came to my head, but doing a comparative study on this might be something useful and very applicable.

Shujaat Alikhan : 11 Jul 2014 21:50 |  Tags: Explicit Kbam Knowledge Mbe Tacit |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

LCC informally

It seems when we discuss topics on life cycle learning, it's always very formalised and structured. But why not consider it in everything we do anyways? If one of the fundamentals of for LCC is based on teh process of intake, maintanence, and output (roughly speaking), then that is true to everything, from what we eat to how we input words into our essay, edit it (maintainability), and output (performance).

I always find it intriguing to have thoughts like this because the people who wrote these ideas might not have the background or experience that we do, so it doesn't mean they know it all,while we can apply this type of frameowrk or methodology to anything we find applicable, and I think we should, just like PDSA or DMAIC can be applied to almost everything.

LCC is simply about taking in mind something from the moment it's made or with you until it's gone and everything else in between. Take your knowledge for instance, learning something new, as Nonaka said, will become tacit knowledge then it can be an explicit knowledge and stored, but of course, you need to nurture it or else it will slowly fade away, and when it does, the cost of it is having to do the same process over again, so to have the best efficieny for LCC is to take in what matters, nurture it and improve it, and ensure that it stay with you for good.

Shujaat Alikhan : 07 Jul 2014 17:24 |  Tags: Costing Cycle Kbam Lcc Life Mbe |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Boundaries in knowledge sharing

We're in the era where there's not too little data - but simply too much.

The internet played a big part - and everything that subsequently followed = migration from print to soft-media, social media, websites, mobility, search engines.

So it's not a challenge of where can I get the information as much as to how we can disseminate information appropriately. In organisations, that requires individuals to know more about something than others - but most importantly - to share that.

I've been in, seen, and heard of cases where although one knows enough about something, they don't want to share it because they are afraid of sharing too much that it affects their performance. How so? Because apparently knowing too much can be dangerous if you're trying to outperform another person.

I think what's missing here is the alignment of objectives, as we've learned in so many of our classes (latest is OPP i believe), that if there's an alignment in goals & objectives, sharing knowledge that will benefit your colleague, your team, and your company should not be faced with such barriers.

Shujaat Alikhan : 06 Jul 2014 18:51 |  Tags: Kbam Knowledge Management Mbe |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Life–Cycle – tangibility

Lice Cycle management as already talked about by many can be seen from a lot of perspectives.

But after spending time reading them, I realized that life cycle management is very similar to every other form of management that is done correctly - paying attention to the whole system or cycle.

Very commonly, we tend to pay attention to a particualr subject or matter when working - while not caring too much about its context, or how it started and what are the possible outcomes of it, because we simply want to work on whatever is then and there.

This is very similar to how we're supposed to do our disseration, the literature review is for us to understand the context of the subject we are covering, and know enough about how things work in that area to come to a substantiated conclusion.

When working, many often just face a problem, fix it and move on, but if they understood how work is normally conducted, from beginning to end, they will know how and why the issue became a problem because everything is tracable. This is the same concept as life cyle costing especially, where everything is recommended to be documented for tracability as well.

From this observation, I suggest everyone to try applying this same 'life-cycle' method of start to end - and even cyclical approach to everything.

Shujaat Alikhan : 05 Jul 2014 06:48 |  Tags: Asset Cost Cycle Kbam Life Management Mbe |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The art of knowledge

After having the opportunity to dive into the realm of what knowledge really is about, I'm surprised one aspect is left out. Sure it's true tacit and explicit knowledge have their own dynamics, but what about short term and long term knowledge affecting work as well?

Isn't it better to have knowledge that sticks to you rather than having to around about it finding the answer everytime?

I believe this has to do wtih what interests and does not interests us as well. Tacit knowledge will be easily adapted if we have an objective or goal infront of us and we try our best to reach it, and if that means we come by some relevant information, it can be related to as well.

Therefore, finding work in the field that interests you might be a good idea if you want to become rich in knowledge that you do not have to go search for it all the time, but it will pass by you and you will most likely remember them well, at least that's what I plan to do.

Because in the end, having to look up or read things that have no interest to me isn't what I want to do all my life.

Shujaat Alikhan : 04 Jul 2014 10:36 |  Tags: Kbam Km Knowledge Management Mbe |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem