Knowledge Management: From Brain to Business (PDF 5.5 - Asian ...

Tata Steel wanted to look at knowledge management from both an IT and people focus.
Thus, Tata companies tried two things: codification which is the capture and transfer of
knowledge independent of time and space, and personal communication in the form of
explicit to tacit knowledge diffusion. Most of the Tata companies have taken the step of
creating their own portals as well as creating communities of practice where it is called
Manthan in Hindi or Sanskrit. It actually means churning, where you bring the people
together. You make sure that there are affinity groups created, they exchange views, they
are connected, they shake hands and all that.
Tata also adopted a Knowledge Community Framework (Figure 2.)
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Figure 2: Knowledge Community Framework
For all this work Tata received the following awards:
• 2006 Global MAKE award
• 2006 Indian MAKE award
• 2005 Indian MAKE award
• 2004 MAKE Asia award
• 2003 MAKE Asia award
• APQC best practice partner
Tata Chemicals is the next company that implemented knowledge management.
Tata Chemicals launched an IT-enabled knowledge management process last year. They
developed interesting unique methodologies, including sharing stories by employees that can
build a repository of tacit knowledge.
Today one of the very interesting methods to bring people together is the storytelling
method. You talk about what happened, tell the whole story and document it. There is a
writer assigned to these groups to document the storyteller’s tacit knowledge.
I was doing a project a few years ago on creating an artificial intelligence-based
maintenance management system and I realized that one of the most difficult jobs is to
acquire the tacit knowledge of the maintenance technicians and managers who have been
operating the plant for more than 40 years.