Ron Ross today tweeted a quote from a very interesting Harvard Business Review’s paper Managing your Mission-Critical Knowledge: “Speeding up codification will increase the value of knowledge. But making the tacit explicit can also be dangerous. The more codified the knowledge is, the more easily it may be diffused and copied externally.” The  paper goes further by offering a conceptual framework (click on the picture on the left) for moving from tacit to explicit knowledge. Here are introductory quotes:

“When executives talk about “knowledge management” today, the conversation usually turns very quickly to the challenge of big data and analytics. That’s hardly surprising: Extraordinary amounts of rich, complicated data about customers, operations, and employees are now available to most managers, but that data is proving difficult to translate into useful knowledge. Surely, the thinking goes, if the right experts and the right tools are set loose on those megabytes, brilliant strategic insights will emerge.”

“Tantalizing as the promise of big data is, an undue focus on it may cause companies to neglect something even more important—the proper management of all their strategic knowledge assets: core competencies, areas of expertise, intellectual property, and deep pools of talent. We contend that in the absence of a clear understanding of the knowledge drivers of an organization’s success, the real value of big data will never materialize.”