Knowledge Mapping

The term -Knowledge Mapping- seems to be relatively new, but it is not. We have been practising this in our everyday life, just what we are not doing is - we are not documenting it, and we are not doing it in a systematic way.

Knowledge Mapping is all about keeping a record of information and knowledge you need such as where you can get it from, who holds it, whose expertise is it, and so on. Say, you need to find something at your home or in your room, you can find it in no time because you have almost all the information/knowledge about -what is where- and -who knows what- at your home.

It is a sort of map set in your mind about your home. But, to set such a map about your organisation and organisational knowledge in your mind is almost impossible. This is where K-map becomes handy and shows details of every bit of knowledge that exists within the organisation including location, quality, and accessibility; and knowledge required to run the organisation smoothly - hence making you able to find out your required knowledge easily and efficiently.

Basic steps in creating K-maps:

Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task

• The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
• Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
• Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
• Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}

What do we map?

The followings are the objects we map:

Explicit knowledge: subject, purpose, location, format, ownership, users, access, right

Tacit knowledge: expertise, skill, experience, location, accessibility, contact, address, relationships/networks

Tacit organisational process knowledge: the people with the internal processing knowledge

Explicit organisational process knowledge: codified organisational process knowledge

What do the knowledge maps show?
Knowledge map shows the sources, flows, constraints, and sinks of knowledge within an organisation. It is a navigational aid to both explicit information and tacit knowledge, showing the importance and the relationships between knowledge stores and the dynamics. The following list will be more illustrative in this regard:

• Available knowledge resources
• Knowledge clusters and communities
• Who uses what knowledge resources
• The paths of knowledge exchange
• The knowledge lifecycle
• What we know we don?t know (knowledge gap)
  
  

Knowledge Mapping

By Deependra Tandukar

Sugestão de participante do Workshop Conhecimento Tácito
coordenado por Sérgio Lins