RETAINING PROFESSIONAL TACIT KNOWLEDGE AND EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE THROUGH ELECTRONIC RECORDS MANAGEMENT

Abstract

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to identify how experience and tacit knowledge can be externalized and articulated in a way that they can be the object of electronic records management (ERM) as well as establish the areas of convergence between ERM and knowledge management (KM). The study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a single case study of a successful software (SW) development private company that specializes in SW for archive management. 25 participants from this Chinese software company were selected based on their role in SW design and development and were interviewed using a semi-structured interview script. Gathered data were analysed by using an a priori thematic analysis approach, which was focused on the processes of externalisation for tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that can be used by using ERM. The findings of this research suggest that evidence of experience is best defined by story-telling and unstructured narratives that capture tacit knowledge and are then easily managed through ERM. Knowledge which is derived from experience often affects and helps to improve the performance of agents in human activity systems of all types, ranging from business organizations to social networks. However, both tacit knowledge and evidence of experience are hard to capture, represent and maintain by organizations since they reside in individual’s minds rather than in information repositories. Therefore, more than theoretical research and propositions there is a need to devise clear processes to translate and externalize tacit knowledge into explicit one that can then be stored, shared and used. This study contributes to this practical and applied KM and ERM research and provides new and practice grounded insights in this area.