Knowledge Management Strategy- Codification Vs. Personalization

Before selecting a Knowledge Management strategy for your organization it is always good to learn which strategy suits more_ Codification or Personalization. There is no general agreement that one strategy is better that the other. It all depends on the nature/ culture of your organization. So before deciding which strategy suits you more, lets have a clear understanding of what each strategy is about;

Codification		Personalization
People to Documents		People to People
Usually high quality, reliable and fast information systems are needed		Provide, creative, analytically rigorous advice on high level strategic problems by channeling individual experience
Typically includes databases of information, previous presentations and reports.		Knowledge workers use each other as resources through brain-storming sessions, networking, one-on-one conversations and team projects where the focus is on individual knowledge and experience.
The knowledge workers experience are stored in documents, either on hard or electronic copies.		This method is particularly used when information cannot be codified and stored electronically
Knowledge is not connected to a specific person and reused for multiple projects
Advantages	Disadvantages	Advantages	Disadvantages
Explicit knowledge can be reused and approached easily	High investment in IT	Highly customized solutions	Higher chance of ambiguity occurrence
A large amount of knowledge can be stored and accessed	Highly IT literate workforce	Moderate investment in IT	Difficult to be communicated and understood due to different levels of experience each possesses
Easy to understand and make use of	The reuse of knowledge which is applicable to many projects hinders the quality of the outcome of a performed task.	Staff does not need to be highly IT literate but should possess skills in dealing with ambiguity and problem solving	High use of facilities needed (conference rooms, etc)
		One to one monitoring	Time consuming

Things to be considered when selecting a strategy;

• The type of products- Standardized and mature (Codification)/ Customized and innovative (Personalization)
• What type of knowledge do employees rely on? Explicit (Codified)/ Tacit (Personalized)
• Which primary strategy best fits competitive business strategy?

The best results are achieved when a firm focuses on one strategy; however a secondary strategy can be employed to support the primary, but with less emphasis.

Read more on Harvard Business Review "What's Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge"

Knowledge Management Processes- SECI Model

As discussed in the previous article  "Knowledge Management Defined" Beccerra et al. define knowledge management in terms of discovering, capturing, sharing and applying knowledge. This article is on what these processes mean. The SECI model illustrated int the diagram below explains the movement of knowledge within these four processes.

The following sub sections briefly discuss the four processes;
Knowledge Discovery (KD)- is the development of new tacit and explicit knowledge from data, information or synthesis of prior knowledge. (Beccerra et al. 2010). KD occurs as following;

• Socialization-  Socialization takes place when converting tacit into tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge resides in people and it always works more effectively between people who have common cultures and successful working groups. 
• Combination-  Combination takes place when converting explicit into explicit knowledge. (Marwick, 20010). This can happen during the meetings in the form of emails, documents etc. Further education, training and data mining are also forms of combination.

Knowledge Capture (KC)-is defined as "the process of retrieving either explicit or tacit knowledge that resides within people, artifacts or organizational activities"(Beccerra et al. 2010). KC occurs in two distinct ways as 'Internalization' and 'Externalization'. The sole purpose of KC is to optimize exploitation and distribution of knowledge by people and organizations.

• Externalization- Involves in conversation of tacit into explicit knowledge, which is difficult.Through conceptualization, elicitation and articulation, typically in collaboration with some proportion of one's tacit knowledge maybe capture in explicit form.
• Internalization - Involves in conversation of explicit into tacit knowledge. Internalized knowledge must be understood, which involves creating tacit knowledge. Internalization is comparatively challenging because information grows exponentially every day.

Knowledge Sharing (KS)-Sharing of knowledge is takes a vital focus in KM. It is defined as "the process through which explicit or tacit knowledge is communicated to other individuals". KS involves in socializing (Refer KD section) and exchanging gathered knowledge by any individual or by groups with other individuals. 

• Exchange- Communicating knowledge in the form of explicit to explicit. This means sharing captured knowledge such as manuals, mathematical expressions, reports, graphs etc. "Once an individual articulates his or her knowledge in a document, process description or other form of explicit knowladge repository, it is possible to quickly disseminate that knowledge throughout an organization or indeed anywhere int the world via Information Systems"(Sanchez, 2004).

Knowledge Applying (KA)- Depends on the available knowledge which in turn depend on the process of knowledge discovery, capture and storage. (Beccerra et al. 2010). The better these processes take place, chances are that knowledge for effective decision making is available to enhance organizational performance. KA takes place in following ways.

• Direction- Individuals possessing the knowledge direct the action of another individual without transferring to that person the knowledge underlying the direction. For example, an implementation engineer directs his subordinates to solve a problem in an IS. The subordinates execute the task without having the knowledge to solve a similar problem.
• Routine-Exploitation of knowledge embedded in procedures, rules and norms that guide the future behavior. Routines economize on communication more than directions because they are embedded in procedures  (Beccerra-Fernandez  et al., 2004). They take time to develop, hence cannot  take place within a short period like direction. For example, new employee is given a set of tasks which needs to be performed after going through and understanding previous manuals/ documentations of lessons learned.