A principled approach to knowledge elicitation and transfer in organisations

Abstract

This thesis describes research carried out to investigate and address the problems related to the elicitation of knowledge from experts and its transfer to potential stakeholders in organisations. Essentially, knowledge elicitation and transfer is understood as a process of enabling people to acquire new capabilities while others who already have such capabilities explicate the domain specific knowledge underlying their performance. Knowledge elicitation and transfer have become essential processes in an environment influenced by the rate and direction of technological change, and characterised by an increasing complexity of tasks and greater employee mobility. The starting point of this research was the implementation of a knowledge elicitation and transfer strategy based on the use of social software at Cranfield University. Failure of that software to achieve its aims raised awareness of the limitations of purely technology-based approaches to knowledge elicitation and transfer. A collaboration with a gas turbine manufacturer then provided the setting for the trial of a people-based approach to knowledge elicitation and transfer. In a literature review an endeavour was made to study and provide an overview of the main contexts in which the knowledge elicitation and transfer problems have arisen. For each of the areas identified, an overview of the advantages and limitations of the techniques that have been used was provided. The literature shows that despite its importance for organisations, there is no method which is guaranteed to achieve knowledge elicitation and transfer. This motivated the researcher to formalise, refine and validate the newly developed approach by applying it in different organisations. The research has resulted in a number of contributions to knowledge and benefits for the organisations involved. A key contribution is a development of a new method called Concepts-Modelling-Experience (CoMEx), based on collaborative modelling of domain-specific knowledge. The applications of CoMEx in the field suggest that it overcomes some of the main deficiencies of well known approaches to knowledge elicitation and knowledge transfer, and that it brings additional benefits to organisations. However, the research has identified areas where there is significant scope for further research and investigatio