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Most small businesses (and often big businesses as well) strugle to consolidate
and process their employee's knowledge in a useful manner. The result is large
repositories of employees and customers data that cannot be easily reused among
applications. Information is hard to be found, frustration reigns among employees,
and business opportunities are missed.
In general intellectual and knowledge assets fall into one of two categories:
explicit or tacit. As a general rule of thumb, explicit knowledge consists of
anything that can be documented and codified, and can include assets such as patents,
trademarks, business plans, marketing research and customer lists.
Tacit knowledge is a more difficult concept, but in very broad terms can be defined
as the know-how contained in people's heads. The challenge with tacit knowledge
is to recognize, generate, share and manage it. While groupware and related technologies
can help facilitate the dissemination of tacit knowledge, identifying tacit knowledge
itself is a major task for most organizations.
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