Avoiding the "army of professional amateurs" paradox: capturing tacit knowledge in our workforce

Defense AT&L, March-April, 2008 by Doug McCallum

One technology that has become highly effective in recent years for transferring explicit knowledge is online classes, or eLearning systems. These online classes have developed from earlier versions that were of questionable effectiveness to recent versions that are highly effective, interactive, and well-designed in their ability to allow the student to learn the required knowledge. Examples of such classes are those that are offered by the Defense Acquisition University or DoD's Skillport[TM] classes. These courses encompass a wide range of subjects from leadership development courses to more technically-based knowledge such as the acquisition workforces' certifications or IT end-user curricula. These classes are truly effective for developing administrative and technical skills, but they frequently do not have the capability of capturing and transferring content-specific, organizationally-unique knowledge such as the tacit knowledge of the company commander operating in an asymmetric warfare environment. It takes a large amount of resources to develop online courses, while new tacit knowledge capture tools allow an organization to capture and share specific, critical knowledge more quickly with far less costs.

Another evolutionary step in tacit knowledge capture and transfer is the <http://companycommand.army.mil> Web site, which shares tacit knowledge throughout a specific community of practice and takes the additional step of establishing online protege-mentor relationships. This community allows those seeking knowledge that will help prepare them for company-level command to connect laterally to a larger world, introducing them to many styles of leadership and issues of battle-ready command. It creates an opportunity for the learning curve to begin well before officers actually take command of a company, and the learning and contribution continues through their years in command and beyond. However, the Company Command site still relies on written documents, lessons learned, and other knowledge that is time-consuming to codify, and it fails to use emerging, efficient, key-word-searchable audio-visual capture technology that allows for increased tacit knowledge capture and transfer.

Each of these evolving knowledge capture-and-transfer systems reduces the cost of capturing and transferring knowledge while expanding the number and types of users who can access this knowledge.

Taking Online Learning to New Dimensions

An emerging technology in capturing and transferring tacit knowledge is the net-based oral history. This off-the-shelf technology is inexpensive, easy to use, and provides a broad range of applicability. It builds on a net-based portal system's capabilities, encompassing communities of practice, hosting shared explicit knowledge (i.e., shared folders and files), providing information security, and linking protege-mentor relationships through collaborative connections. Net-based oral histories add another feature to capturing tacit knowledge. They quickly and easily capture an individual's lessons learned and allow the individual to use any combination of graphics (such as PowerPoint[R] slides or whiteboard concept sketches) to visually supplement the oral history, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer. This technology is similar to that found on YouTube, but it provides a structured and focused learning message. Most importantly, it can be searched by key words in order to go to that specific part of the oral history that is relevant to the knowledge seeker. This is a big improvement over current Army video KM systems, in which the user must watch hours of video in order to obtain the few nuggets of pertinent knowledge.