KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
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What distinguishes your law firm from all the others?
Is it the information you have amassed over the years and
continue to gather, buy, organize and disseminate? As important
as it is, information is not the primary differentiator, even more so
since the advent of the internet. With access to information being
ubiquitous, geing our hands on information has become far less
important than how quickly we can turn it into knowledge.
What really distinguishes organizations is what they know,
their intellectual capital. An organization's knowledge is a function
of the unique stream of diverse individuals who pass through it.
No two organizations are the same because no two ever have had
identical members, clients, actions and interactions. Knowledge is
born of information combined with experience, and every person's
experience is different. An organization's knowledge is the sum of
its peoples' experiences, perspectives and interactions with each
other, and internal and external information.
The problem is this kind of knowledge, also called know-
how or tacit knowledge, is difficult to harness; we oen hear
tacit knowledge described as the knowledge that leaves
our organizations at the end of every work day. Innovative
organizations encourage broader interactions by providing both
physical and virtual spaces for them to occur. They also try to
convert this knowledge into recorded, aka explicit, knowledge
that can be shared to reap value, spark innovation and grow the
organization's knowledge base. Here are a few techniques for
capturing, reproducing and sharing some of this elusive knowledge
and creating opportunities for generating new knowledge.
by Ginevra Saylor of Dentons
Transforming Tacit Knowledge:
Making the Most
of What You Know
Transforming Tacit Knowledge: Making the Most of What You Know
