How blogs and wikis can help knowledge management

The e-consultancy site offers advice on many e-business topics. In a recent post Wayne Robinson discusses how blogs and wikis can help knowledge management. Wayne writes, “From my window, I can see the great cathedral of York Minster,” which certainly makes me envious. He goes on to link the building of this cathedral to how knowledge is gained, including the socialization, externalization, and then the concept of combination.

“Combination is the process of creating more complex and systematic sets of explicit knowledge - it is combined, edited or processed to create new knowledge. Blogs can aid in this process firstly by making the explicit knowledge available in the first place, and then making it possible to add to what exists through linking, quoting or commenting. A wiki enables rapid creation of explicit knowledge, but also makes it incredibly easy to edit and combine. And both provide a readily-accessible store of the new knowledge.”

He then goes on to discuss how knowledge is externalized and adds:

“By providing a way of creating explicit knowledge from the store of tacit knowledge around the organisation, blogs and wikis can aid the internalisation process. Reading the progress of a project through a blog archive, or following a procedure that’s been documented in a wiki enables an individual to convert this into the tacit knowledge that will allow them to be effective in their roles. But having internalised the explicit knowledge, this can then lead to a new spiral of knowledge creation - tacit knowledge accumulated by the individual can be the trigger for new knowledge creation when it is shared with others.”

There is more and further suggested readings including Managing Knowledge: An Essential Reader, published by the Open University and Sage Publications.