Title: A Practical Framework for Documentation of Experience and Knowledge Acquisition of Experts in Organiza
Title: A Practical Framework for Documentation of Experience and Knowledge Acquisition of Experts in Organiza
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Authors: Ruhollah Tavallaee & Mohammad Mehdi Rashidi
Subject: Knowledge management
Publish: 2010
Status: full text
Source: ICBER 2010, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, ISI Proceeding
پابگاه علمی مدیریت و حسابداری منبع: mba20.blog.ir
Abstract: Now a day one
of the main concerns of organizations is the issue of high experienced
managers and experts who are transferring from their company imposes a
big loss on organization. while effective performance of an organization
in a competitive situation depends highly on awareness of past mistakes
and learning from them .Documenting intangible experience of the expert
paves the way for organizational learning and consequently better
performance of organization.
In order to acquisition, documentation and
codification, transfer, share and use of the organizational experience,
we need to have a suitable and practical model with high validity. This
article offers a practical framework to acquisition and document
knowledge from experience of the experts in the organizations. This
model has experimentally been used by institute for international energy
studies (IIES) for acquisition and documenting experience of 45 experts
and managers of Islamic Republic of Iran’s petroleum industry and
necessary modifications of the model have been done based on obtained
results. this model includes five main stages: 1 - recognition, 2
–training, 3 - knowledge acquisition, 4–knowledge editing, 5 – knowledge
management data base designing and knowledge electronic packaging.
Keywords: Knowledge, experience, knowledge acquisition, knowledge management, documentation, petroleum industry, I.R.Iran.
I. INTRODUCTION
An important managerial event, from its
emergence, examining its different aspects, organizational realities,
assumptions, concepts, questions to decisions and investigating its
effects, should be considered as an historical event and analyzed
correctly. Moreover, the shortest way to improve management level is to
upgrade managers’ ability and knowledge, learning from valuable
experience and mistakes of other managers. Its clear that documentation
and experience transmission play an important role in organizational
learning, [16] it is necessary to use explicit and implicit knowledge of
organizations in a proper and sensible way.
Human resources aren’t able to keep all
the information in mind spontaneously and completely and since personal
experience is no longer considered as a personal property, documenting
methods and learned material is the best strategy to transfer social and
personal experience to other people. In this regard, leading
organizations value collective knowledge (instead of personal
one)because keeping valuable experience and transferring them correctly
to staff will bring many advantages including time reduction ,
non-repeating previous tests ,reducing software and hardware costs to
achieve an experience [12].
Manager’s experience in an organization is considered as intellectual capitals of that organization which increase by the time.
In general, the most important goals of documenting experts’ experience in an organization are as follow:
1. Increasing organizational synergy due to use of obtained results.
2. Learning from others’ experience.
3. Creating common perspective due to documentation and experience transmission [17].
4. Recording experience, successes,
failures, development stages and other important events of organization
historically and practically and evaluating them.
5. Teaching culture of organization to next generations of managers and staff [11].
6. Creating insight .knowledge, power and creativity among managers and staff.
7. Revolution in the organization by transmitting experience.
8. Increasing productivity by documenting norms related to efficiency, affectivity and conducting them [4].
9. Facilitating information cycle and experience.
10. Providing a suitable condition to exchange thoughts and experience by teams [9].
II. EXPERIENCE AND DOCUMENTATION
Experience is defined as an influence on
judgment and feeling by any kind of event, whether person has observed
it or participated in, as well as describing an issue or material,
personal acquaintance, enjoyment or real pain [14]. Davenport and prusak
in their book (Knowledge Management) state that experience refer to
past events and since words “Experience –Expert” derivate from a Latin
word meaning test , experience and expert can be used interchangeably
.Expert refers to a person who has knowledge in a specific field and
practically tested it . They believe initial benefit of experience is
creating historical image in mind .Using this image , we can observe new
events and that knowledge-based experience help people to create a
relationship between what has happened past and what is happening now .
Here, writers have mentioned to the
definition of experience in an organization from experts’ point of view:
experience of the expert in an organization describe a real situation
which includes expert’s understanding from organizational operations and
surrounding events with the aim of providing wide personal and
organizational perspectives for them as well as learning capability,
skills of reusing and transferring them to others (knowledge creation).
Examining organizational theories shows
those different theorists, from scientific management classic school to
contemporary experts, all value organizational experience and
documentation [8]. State (1989) believes that organizational learning
realizes through creating common perspective , knowledge and subjective
models and is based on past experience. Moreover, people and
organizations learn through their own successes, failures and regular
evaluating of them [7].
Process documentation refers to
collection, adjustment, formulation and classification. These concepts
show that all above factors emphasize on keeping information and that
commonality of documentation is based on recording part of human
knowledge. Documenting methods and techniques is a confident strategy to
transfer personal and social experience to others [11]. Leading
organizations therefore follow collective knowledge and try to document
their own organizational knowledge. Documenting experience also change
subjective knowledge of people to explicit one (documented knowledge)
and this way organization achieves new knowledge through exchanging
experience and explicit knowledge .Turban believes that documenting
experience of organization is a methodology to introduce and transfer
work experience for other people to use it.
III. CHALLENGES IN KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION OF EXPERTS
A state above, to validate this model ,
formulated stages to achieve experience of 45 experts were followed in
Iran’s petroleum industry by institute for international energy studies.
Conducting this process, we made a model (please see figure 1.) and
applied it to mentioned 45 experts (managers), the results showed some
challenges for documenting experience which may be seen in similar
projects. The main challenges are as follow:
1. Complexity of knowledge in companies
(especially technical knowledge) and therefore unfamiliarity of
engineers with that field
2. Short time of experts with acquiring human-based knowledge as a time-consuming task
3. Inability of knowledge engineer to communicate properly with experts
4. Inability of knowledge engineer in classification of experience
5. Multiple knowledge fields of experts
6. Difference of work methods of expert with what he really does
7. Character of experts and the way they communicate with knowledge engineers
As stated, some experts have different
characters which make interview sessions hold differently. These
characters are as follow:
1. Doubtful: he thinks his position in the
company depends on his knowledge and that he will no longer be needed
if he reveals his experience. Therefore, he rarely answers your
questions correctly.
2. Captious: he hates his work situation and company itself and may give false information.
3. Conceited: he considers himself as the best person in his field.
4. Compassionate: extracting knowledge
from him is difficult because he talks eagerly about his marginal
successes but not main points
5. Laconic: he doesn’t talk much about details of his work
6. Indifferent: he doesn’t object with
comments made by the engineers. This may result from his timidity or
indifference to project.
As an important result, we needed a KM
approach to documentation of experts experience, which will explained in
next section of the paper.
IV. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO DOCUMENTATION EXPERTS EXPERIENCE
Some scientists define knowledge as an
organized combination of rules and opinions, procedures and information.
In other words, knowledge is a mixture of experience, values, current
information and organized expert attitudes which gives a framework to
evaluate and use new information [10]. Knowledge was regarded as an
advantage for organizations which brings the ability of continuous
innovation and competitive power. Documenting experience and
distributing them will be considered as knowledge management if
knowledge is a product of information, experience, skills and attitudes
people have in a specific time and place [1]. Moreover, experience
documentation changes implicit knowledge of people which is related to
their perception and conduct into explicit and general one and thus by
exchanging explicit knowledge and experience new knowledge is obtained.
This article, therefore offers a documentation model for experience of
experts in an organization with an approach to knowledge management.
V. PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK
Knowledge acquisition methodology in this
research is based on valid methods of Human Driven Knowledge Acquisition
(HDKA). After examining current techniques including protocol-analysis,
protocol-generating, protocol-classification, diagram –driven
techniques and etc, Institute for International Energy Studies (IIES)
with cooperation of outstanding consultants created a combined technique
to acquire knowledge of experts of Islamic Republic of Iran’s petroleum
industry which includes following stages:
1. step of recognition
This stage is the first part of KA during
which necessary preparations are made to acquire knowledge from experts.
The importance of this stage is due to the formation of knowledge bank
as well as common belief between knowledge management’s experts, experts
and managers.
Subsections:
1.1. Formation of knowledge management team
Since all activities should be approved by
management and there should be positive interaction between experts,
experts and managers, the above-said team is formed by the presence of
representatives of all 3 sections whose responsibility is monitoring and
guiding the plan and decides on important and sensitive stages of the
project.
1.2. Formation of information bank
At first, a complete information bank of
experts under study is created which includes knowledge parameters of
these people based on standard Personal Knowledge Questionnaires (PKQ),
(Appendix 1).
1.3. Recognition and modeling knowledge fields
Knowledge fields of organization based on
methodology of knowledge planning are modeled after examining
organizational documents, conducting recognition interviews with experts
and managers, holding common meetings between managers and KM experts
and concept tree is drawn by identifying classes, knowledge fields as
well as knowledge levels and ultimately is approved by Knowledge
Management Team (KMT).These classes and knowledge levels are of great
importance when interview questions are chosen and knowledge is coded.
For example, after doing pilot plan in IIES, concept tree for knowledge
fields of petroleum industry with over 160 general and technical items
was drawn.
1.4. Designing questionnaire
Organized and semi-organizes
questionnaires in different knowledge fields are designed based on key
organizational questions as well as discussions made by KM experts and
managers (regarding interview opportunities in knowledge extraction
stage)and then approved by KMT.
1.5. Questioning schedule and expert assignment
Questioning schedule is approved at the
end of this stage and experts are assigned to classes based on current
information found in experts’ information bank .In this stage , one
expert may be questioned in one or more classes, thus a separate code
will be allocated to him.
2. step of training
This stage, after obtaining results of
recognition stage, is an opportunity to prepare executive teams of
interview as well as justify experts under study with the following
sections:
2.1. Stating importance of plan to experts under study
This activity is done for stating
importance of plan to experts and that experts play an influential role
in project. This stage is initiated by holding training workshops and
meetings with experts using methods based on knowledge sharing of
implicit and forgotten instructions of experts and ultimately tacit
knowledge or knowledge extraction warm up is formed. People are given
standard forms in these meetings, so that they can better prepare
themselves for interview.
2-2.Training interviewers and editors
Interviewers (partly includes members of
KMT’s consultants and partly a few personnel of participated
organization in interviews) and knowledge editors are trained
specifically for organizational purposes and modeling knowledge fields
of that organization is properly explained.
3. step of knowledge acquisition
This stage is the most important part of
project and all processes done in previous stages help to upgrade this
stage. This stage includes extraction of knowledge from experts and time
dedicated to each expert is nearly 3 two-hour sessions.
3.1. Communication
In this stage communication is made based
on information bank and interaction with experts and questions are sent
together with short explanations.
3.2. Interview
Interviews with experts are done based on
known knowledge tree with predetermined goals .In this part,
interviewers as teams consisting 3 or 4 members (at least one expert as
selected by KMT) ask questions. In interview sessions, each expert
answers his own question based on interview techniques such as diagram,
laddering, teach back, etc.
In each questioning session and by stating
experts’ responses, knowledge acquisitions reach to its maximum level.
Moreover, experts’ responses are saved as audio files and transcribed at
the end of each session and then technically edited by KM’ experts.
After each session and after examining interview points by knowledge
management team, remaining questions for the next session are determined
and knowledge fields are revised and formulated. Experience
demonstrates that proper time between each interview session would be
nearly 7 days.
3.3. Classification in standard forms
After doing interviews, edited texts are
placed in special forms suitable for coding by KM experts. In this
stage, materials related to each topic and knowledge title obtained from
different interview sessions are arranged as a “Knowledge Table”.
4. step of editing knowledge
The purpose of this stage is that
extracted knowledge as a knowledge package obtains the capability to
enter knowledge bases .It consists of 3 following sections:
4.1. Knowledge coding (preparing initial knowledge notebooks)
All previous interviews include tens of
various knowledge instructions. In this stage, KM experts together with
other outstanding experts, separate and code instructions and refer them
to specific knowledge fields using interview content analysis method
and subsequently experts’ knowledge packages are formed . Each package
consists of knowledge title, knowledge text, knowledge fields and
remaining questions for enrichment of knowledge.
4.2.Editing initial notebooks by experts
In this stage, initial knowledge notebooks
are given back to experts for editing and then they are asked to answer
the questions in a written form .Subsequently, modifications are made
on notebooks and are finalized. In this stage, all finalized notebooks
should be revised and edited by supervisor of the plan .Knowledge
packages, therefore are defined regarding knowledge class, knowledge
level and code of expert.
4.3.Knowledge shaping
In this section, various knowledge is
shaped and molded with respect to standard codes prepared by software
team and approved by KMT and consequently is arranged to enter to the
system.
5. Design of data base for knowledge management and knowledge building package
By this stage, knowledge is in the form of
mass of paper texts with various codes and class indexes which should
be sorted using Information Technology (IT). Thus in this stage
information is entered to system, in addition to designing and
practicing an organized information bank (which mostly includes modules
from designed software system of information bank).Its stages are as
follow:
5.1.Designing system
Software system of knowledge bank is
designed based on RFP prepared in recognition stage. This stage includes
recognition, designing system structure, designing information bank,
system coding, and documentation and testing.
5.2. Information entry and electronic package-making
In this stage, all previous information is
entered to system and system automatically and with correct recognition
distributes needed reports among users. At the end of this stage, all
targeted reports of KMT are extracted, packed and produced easily by the
system itself and activities like searching; knowledge marketing and
even obtaining comments and scoring become possible. Since this system
has the capability of increasing knowledge level and its respective
documents and even experts, it can properly be used in creating a
comprehensive knowledge bank for all staff of the organization.
In general, IIES’s combined model of knowledge acquisition in petroleum industry is as follows:
Figure 1. IIES’s combined model for knowledge acquisition
VI. CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR ORGANIZATION
Despite emergence of knowledge management
concepts in organizations for about 2 decades, they have recently
considered in Iran and academic communities. For this reason, knowledge
management concepts are regarded theoretically .Moreover, intangible
knowledge and intellectual capitals of the organizations are hidden in
experts’ mind and factors like retirement, transfer and modification of
experts make organizations to lose such knowledge. Knowledge management
systems are executed in these conditions with the goal of
identification, creation, storage, retrieval, sharing and using needed
knowledge in an organization.
Since implicit knowledge and intellectual
capitals play an important role in organizations, experience
documentation is regarded as a tool which enables organizations to make
effective decisions encountering serious problems, get immunity against
past mistakes and subsequently obtain stable competitive advantages.
The purpose of this article was to study
experts’ experience documentation in petroleum industry and subsequently
offers a combined technique for knowledge acquisition by IIES to
organizations. Obtaining other goals related to knowledge acquisition
requires the following:
1-Forming a committee consisting experts
of that organization (Sagacity Committee) to guide designed knowledge
bank and take actions to complete and enrich knowledge of organizations
continuously.
2-Persistently following activities regarding experience documentation in the form of analysis and enriching knowledge
3-creating current procedure for documenting experts’ experience on the threshold of retirement permanently
4-Formulating knowledge strategy and determining KM road map in the organization.
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