Knowledge management is still a problem for many organizations and at two different levels: tacit knowledge, which typically resides in the head of each individual and gets lost for the organizations when a person goes to work with a different company; and explicit knowledge, which presents growing costs for its dissemination in the organization. In the chapter, the author proposes a model to address those problems, taking for base the SECI (socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization) model, originally developed for knowledge management, together with an e-learning platform and a set of activities as tools to implement a working solution. Such models have the ability to solve organizational knowledge problems, implementing a knowledge management process, allowing the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
TopConcepts And Definitions
The concepts important for this chapter and that are used are knowledge, knowledge management, e-learning and its applications in companies.
It is easy to find authors that have written about the concept of knowledge (Handzic, 2006; Maier and Schmidt, 2007; Nunes et al., 2006; Podgorski, 2010; Schulte et al., 2004; Teo and Gay, 2006), several of whom cite Nonaka (1994) and Nonaka and Takeuchi (1996). Their work is centered on the concept of two distinct types of knowledge, explicit and tacit, with explicit knowledge being that which is known and shared, and tacit on to knowledge being that which is stored within the minds of individuals. Many authors use those concepts (Floyde et al., 2013) and, in this chapter, we will also use those definitions and types of knowledge.
Nonaka worked extensively with the concepts of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, and drew attention to the way organizations tend to focus too much on the former (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1996). These conclusions have been supported by many authors since then, from the field of organizational learning to knowledge management (e.g. Cook & Brown 1999, Kreiner 2002, Tsoukas & Valdimirou 2001, etc.).
Figure 1. Representation of the SECI model