In an organizational set up, expertise entails the skills, comprehension and attributes of employees or systems which make a distinction between them and the novices or the inexperienced personnel. Expertise is a factor of production which resides in individual’s heads but is utilized actively by the organization. Expertise is thus believed to be a power that individuals hold upon a given specialty. Consequently, expertise is held upon different fields within the organization. This explains the fact why individuals cannot have expertise in all aspects or functions that the organization is involved in. Thus, expertise is differentiated along the various departments that the organization creates. The organization invests its social capital in achieving the best level of expertise which would sustain it (Shaw, 2003, pg. 938). Expertise in an organization can be acquired from external sources or internally in the organization. Thus the organization seeks to acquire expertise from the most desirable source. It is also vital for the organization to store its acquired expertise; this can be stored in individuals, computers, and documents or within the organization (McKenzie, 2001, pg. 125). Knowledge management in an organization is meant to create, share and use the acquired expertise in achieving the set organizational goals. However, it is important that the organization equips the necessary infrastructure to foster effective knowledge management. Hence, knowledge management comes in to facilitate the whole process of creating, sharing and using the expertise gained by an organization.
The organization would therefore be urged to ensure that it takes into consideration the success factors for steering knowledge management in accomplishing its objectives. Expertise in organizations can be categorized into various types depending on the nature of the knowledge. To begin with, tacit expertise is capability that would not be articulated by the holder. Hence, it would be difficult for an individual to describe how such expertise is acquired. This means that only that individual can posses that particular expertise. Secondly, implicit expertise is expertise that can be communicated by the holder. Thus, this type of expertise can be inferred to another person by way of observation or through teaching the skills to other persons. However, this would require that individuals have some formal knowledge before they can be able to effectively acquire this kind of expertise. Lastly, explicit expertise is a type of expertise which is learnt formally through some sources such as books or particular programs (Lee & Chen, 2012, pg. 55). This is the kind of expertise that most employees demonstrate given a typical organizational set up. Thus this type of expertise is learnt through a peculiar process and individuals are able to synthesis this in their systems.
Hence, it can be easily applied in performing various functions which are core to the organization. In the recent ever changing organizational environment it has become vital for organizations to incorporate knowledge management in their entire system. Conversely, it is significant that after organizations acquire a particular expertise they should be able to share the same to other employees in the organization (Edwards, 2003, pg. 138). This helps to ensure that the organization maintains a fairly knowledgeable workforce which is familiar with the core operations of the firm. This also acts as a way of storing the acquired expertise within the organization which is significant in ensuring that competitors do not get reach of the acquired expertise (Shaw, 2003, pg. 201). However, a majority of organizations are faced with various challenges in their attempts to share the acquired expertise. In order to effectively share expertise within an organization there needs to be a facilitating social setting for proper sharing of knowledge. This is where the social capital of the organization comes in conveniently. Social capital of an organization is described along three major aspects of cognitive dimension, relational dimension and structural dimensions. The cognitive dimension of social capital involves frequent narratives and divided language which are embedded in the social cognitive features of the organization.
Secondly, the relational dimension of social capital entails obligations, trust, a mutual identification and norms. Lastly, the structural aspect of social investment reveals the requirement for employees to interact with others in an organization so as to get resources that are not at their reach. Social capital is built when individual employees suppose that their actions would be learnt by others and this would help them to achieve their obligations. Hence, the cognitive, relational and structural aspects of social capital must be incorporated in the organizational system so as to achieve an efficient knowledge management (Holsapple & Joshi, 2002, pg. 482). Thus, in order to ensure that expertise is shared within the organization, there must be a clearly defined approach of how the social capital would be utilized. Currently, expertise sharing is manifested in four broad technical directions. These directions are aligned along a facet that varies from the expertise separated from individual employee to expertise instituted in collections of employees. The foremost technical direction is a repository which is made up of data storage of expertise pieces. This supposes that an organization must have the ability the actions that it has previously performed. The rationale here is to put the previously acquired expertise in some form of information data base.
Therefore, this involves decontextualizing expertise by the writer and another process of recontextualizing the information by the reader or the person that expertise is to be shared. However, this technical approach of sharing expertise was faced with various challenges such as the vague assumptions made on its usability (Edwards, 2003, pg. 140). The second technical direction is the use of expertise locators. Expertise locators are search engines or directories that enable individuals to locate other persons who possess the expertise required in handling some particular operations. However, this requires that these search directories should be stored with up to date information on employee’s expertise. The organization must also incorporate the social relational and social structural aspects of the individuals with the expertise stored in the search directories. This enables other employees that would be interested in acquiring expertise to have a glance of the experts so as to be able to acquire knowledge from them effectively (Bontis, 2003, pg. 20). The expertise data stored in the locators must be timely, correct and also relating to the organizational needs of the workforce. The third technical approach of sharing expertise in an organization is through the use of computer mediated place. This is practical space through which individuals with queries or responses can get together to share ideas.
Thus, an organization creates a virtual community which might be online. Here people with expertise can meet with novices and help them acquire their needed knowledge with regards to their organizational functions. This assumes that people have some predetermined social ties which would help to congregate in a social platform which is computer aided (Jain & Solomon, 2000, pg. 164). This would facilitate the sharing of knowledge amongst the people. This is especially workable in large organizations which have an augmented workforce. However, this approach is constrained by the fact that people in an organization might not be that sociable and thus this would not sustain the social platform in the quest of sharing expertise (Desouza, 2003, pg. 68). The last technical approach that organizations can use in the process of sharing expertise is by creating ad hoc groups. In this approach, the organization group’s employees into informal groups through flexible planning of the firm’s communal network so as to solve specific problems (Eden, 2001, pg. 130). These groups would resemble the crisis groupings which are constituted for the sake of alleviating a given challenge in the organization’s context. The management would form these ad hoc groups by ensuring that they include an expert who is required to share some expertise to other employees.
This can be made successful by embracing technology in enhancing the cohesiveness of these groups (Bhatt, 2001, pg. 73). Through these groups the experts can share their knowledge on a given organizational operation to other employees depending on their field of specialization. However, the organization would be faced with the difficult challenge of assembling the employees into these groups (Parent, 2000, pg. 54). It might also be difficult for the employees to socialize together in the same groups. Hence, it would be important for the management to point out the social relational and social structural features of their employees before grouping them into groups. This helps to ensure that employees would freely interact with their colleagues for the purpose of sharing the needed expertise. The organization must also be in a position to choose people who have proven to have high level expertise on a given specialty. This ensures that these experts would be of use and help in impacting the expertise of other employees. In conclusion, the four technical approaches present the different ways through which an organization can share expertise amongst the employees. This would be to ensure that the workforce is fully fitted to handle the organizational activities and also achieve the predetermined organizational objectives.
Reference List
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