Dr Neil Béchervaise

NB Consulting (Australasia) Pty Ltd

Knowledge Management in Specialised Communities:
Trust and the Transfer of 'Payload Knowledge'

Kevin M. McKenzie
and
Neil E. Bechervaise

Abstract
In response to an increasingly knowledge intensive global economy, organisation knowledge management (KM) research is still evolving. In the early information storage period, knowledge was conceptualised in terms of isolated information items to be stored in rudimentary content and practice databases. Over the past two decades, and largely driven from an IT perspective, KM has been presented as a complex of codification, storage and retrieval processes. This focus continues to drive much of the research agenda, treating knowledge as a private good, owned by either the organisation or its organisation members. It suggests that knowledge can be separated from the context in which it is generated and stored.

A second period of knowledge management, heralded by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), saw knowledge managers promoting the specification and quantification of explicit knowledge from what was termed tacit. In the face of unwillingness among knowledge holders to share their expertise and despite the recognised stickiness of knowledge flow across organisations, this second period provided insights into the very human manner in which knowledge is formalised within organisation.
A more recent development in KM theorisation has established that knowledge is more meaningfully described as a complex mix of explicit information, frequently held by individual experts within a specialist community of practice, while tacit knowledge is held at both individual and community level.

This paper reports a case study focusing on knowledge exchange between consultants in a medium sized Australian consulting firm. Through the in-depth interviewing of sixteen consultants, collected data was analysed using a modified content and discourse analysis. The study identified an eight-stage knowledge transfer process as it occurs within an expert community of practice.

Past 'baggage-laden' knowledge type classifications created confusion for non-academic respondents grappling with describing and understanding increasingly complex definitions. Payload knowledge was identified as a focusing tool, defined practically as 'comprising that specific distillation of knowledge, both tacit and explicit, required to resolve an applied problem in context'. The research found payload knowledge exchange occurs efficiently in informal specialist work communities because members have a shared understanding of what is important, who it can be entrusted to and how it should be communicated to be useful.

Using shared language, communication etiquettes and mental models that have developed in the community over time, the respondents to this study indicated that consultants are able to decontextualise and recontextualise their knowledge efficiently in an exchange situation in ways that are not possible using established explicit processes. Often, however, this knowledge remains tacit because everyone in the community knows it, and hence the cost to convert it to explicit knowledge (if possible at all) is not considered necessary by community members.

The research formulated an eight-stage procedure that describes the interpersonal knowledge exchange process used by consultants to source, gather, integrate and transfer payload knowledge. Requesting consultants (with a need for context specific knowledge) initiate the process at Stage One when the need arises for this payload knowledge. Initially, they carry out a self-resourced search (at Stage Two) to confirm that an intra-firm exchange process is, in fact, required. If unable to satisfy their payload knowledge need at this stage, the consultants enter Stage Three, looking for pointers to a potential credible source. At this stage, they engage in a hopping process between pointers to identify a consultant holding and willing to exchange the required knowledge.

The requesting consultant then enters a complex translation, adaptation and negotiation process to decontextualise the required knowledge and relay it to the source consultant using the community's shared language, etiquette and mental models (Stage Four). This request is recontextualised by source consultants, who confirm in their own mind that they have the required knowledge to fulfil the requesting consultants' needs.

Source consultants then exercise their discretion in agreeing to participate at Stage Five of the model, which activates the complexities of Stage Six, where the desired knowledge is exchanged in the knowledge handover stage. Once again using the community's shared language, etiquette and mental models, the tacit and explicit dimensions of the source consultant's experiential knowledge is condensed and funnelled to the requesting consultants in such a way that they can reconstruct the original meaning.

Having received this knowledge, the requesting consultants translate it once again at Stage Seven to target the very specific context required at their client site. The knowledge transfer complete, it is implemented at Stage Eight and internalised into the consultant's own tacit knowledge base. At this point, the knowledge received from the source consultant has been converted to payload knowledge, the specific knowledge required to get the work done.

This eight-stage knowledge exchange process is seen as central to defining the expertise of the community of consulting practice described in this paper. In addition, the social etiquette of informal meetings, the transfer of tacit behavioural knowledge about how to 'be' a consultant and how to facilitate the consulting process through the community, are each learned within the community and require permission to access the community. Gaining permission to access the community requires learning the unwritten rules and specialised language of the community, and sources of payload knowledge are often jealously guarded as consultants protect their expertise from outsiders.

The paper identifies significant reasons that consultants prefer this interpersonal process over information system based repositories. They perceived the process as saving time, encouraging the artistry of the consulting profession, allowing the confirmation of their personal knowledge against the combined collective of community knowledge, and enabling them to maintain and extend their access to the community via personal networks. The process is socially required (as the prevailing community etiquette) and seen as enjoyable when compared with IT based alternatives.

The high levels of socialisation demanded across this knowledge exchange process strongly suggest that knowledge is both a flow of comprehension and a set of things. This paper argues that payload knowledge is only meaningful within a shared social framework - the community of expertise, which can construct or reconstruct it to meet immediate and appropriate demand. Knowledge management, if it is to effectively meet the needs of knowledge seekers into the future, must focus increasingly on providing appropriate forums for meaningful payload knowledge creation and exchange.

Keywords: Knowledge Management, Communities of Practice, Knowledge Exchange, Quality Management

For presentation to: Australian Conference for Knowledge Management & Intelligent Decision Support, Melbourne, December, 2002

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