READIT - 2009 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

upon by indwelling and is the basis for the formation of explicit knowledge. It is
connected to values, perceptions and beliefs. The statement “We can know more than we
can tell” of Polanyi underscores the inexpressible nature of tacit knowledge. However
we use the term ‘explicit knowledge’ where the knowledge is already available explicitly
in the form of documents , audio/ video recordings etc in electronic or non-electronic
form and the term ‘tacit knowledge’ where the knowledge still resides in the minds of
people in the form of experience, feelings, opinions, intuition etc. We feel that certain
percentage of the tacit knowledge can be converted into explicit by suitable knowledge
elicitation methods. Some authors use the term ‘implicit knowledge’ to refer to this
component of tacit knowledge which can be converted into explicit form. From the
context of organization, knowledge can also be classified into core, advanced and
innovative(Zack,1999). According to Zack, core knowledge is that minimum scope and
level of knowledge required just to “play the game”. Advanced knowledge enables an
organization to be competitively viable. Innovative knowledge enables an organization to
lead its industry and competitors and to significantly differentiate itself from its
competitors.
One of the definitions of Knowledge Management(KM) is that “Knowledge
Management is the process of capturing a Company’s collective expertise, wherever, it
resides, in databases, in paper or in people’s heads and distributing it wherever it can
produce maximum pay off” (Hibbard,1997). Here expertise is used as synonym for
knowledge. Also the definition considers explicit knowledge which is available in paper
or in computers and tacit knowledge which resides in the minds of the people. The main
concept is to make available the collective or individual expert’s knowledge wherever it
improves the performance. In this definition the context of KM is the organization.
However the essence of the definition is ‘make available the collective knowledge to
improve performance’. Collective knowledge can be created by combining knowledge
from various sources, for which different sources of knowledge should be made
available. It essentially means individual knowledge needs to be shared. In order to make
the collective knowledge, individual knowledge needs to be shared. The purpose of
making collective knowledge available is to improve performance. Hence the ultimate
goal is to improve performance, leveraging on the collective knowledge. The two
important concepts which can be distilled from the above discussions are “knowledge
sharing” and “performance improvement”. Knowlege is possessed by people, and hence
it is one of the important sub-systems of KM. Similarly certain processes are required to
implement the concepts of KM. Also Technology enables the implementation. And
finally it is the ‘knowledge’ that is shared and enables the performance improvement.
Hence we can identify ‘People’, ‘Process’, ‘Technology’ and ‘Knowledge’ as the
important sub-systems of KM. Tracing the practice of the concepts of KM, since the
early civilization we can identify four different era in the history of KM. The first era can
be called as KM0.0, which is characterized by informal and unsystematic practices of
KM, though the term KM was not in existence at that time. The second era called KM1.0
is characterized by formal, disciplined and systematic practices of KM, after the
introduction of the term KM. The third era called KM2.0 is characterized by agile
practices and ‘wisdom of the crowd’. The fourth era called KM3.0 is characterized by
adoption of Knowledge Engineering practices with higher thrust on Return On