Knowledge management involves capturing both tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to knowledge embedded in a person's experiences and thinking. It can be difficult to capture tacit knowledge but organizations try to do so through interviews with subject matter experts. Explicit knowledge refers to codified knowledge such as written documents. While explicit knowledge makes up about 30% of an organization's total knowledge, capturing more of the remaining 70% of tacit knowledge remains a challenge. Bloom's taxonomy categorizes levels of learning and thinking skills from lower to higher order thinking and can help identify what knowledge to capture from employees.

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Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management (KM) is the science of creating, storing, using, disseminating,
and aggregating contents. The topic of KM came to the business world in late 1980’s but using
knowledge among employees, journalists, philosophers, educators etc. has been an ancient
practice (Dalkir, 2011). The human brain can be a great repository of knowledge; however,
capturing that knowledge from each human brain can be complicated. Organizations are trying to
do just that, capture the knowledge of their employees and make it available for use throughout
the businesses. There are two major types of knowledge; tacit and explicit knowledge. (Nonaka
& Takeuchi, 1995)
Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge is the result of individuals thoughts mixed with their experience along
with background, and the culture of the person. This is also called the undocumented Intellectual
Capital of an organization that leaves the company premises at the end of the day. Capturing tacit
knowledge has become a priority and objective for proactive organizations. Capturing tacit
knowledge can be started as an ad-hoc knowledgeable gathering process by beginning with
interview sessions with the tacit knowledge employees. Interviews should be precise and pertain
to certain topics or subjects that the subject matter expert (SME) has experienced and has shown
their expertise with the successful application of their knowledge. The areas of importance
should be captured for codification as soon as possible. For example; a SME tries to recall the
risks that were associated with a project that she was part of. There is similar project that needs

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this SME’s experience in order to mitigate the risks before the start of the project. As part of the
project planning, the risks, budget, issues that were associated with previous project is now the
focus point of the project manager to overcome the risks before they happen. As is obvious,
capturing an individual’s knowledge can be a worthy plan that can result in a successful
implementaion, making for a healthy and solid project without going through the same mistakes
as the previous team.
Explicit Knowledge
Capturing tacit knowledge into some format for future use is called gathering explicit
knowledge. It is not easy to capture individual’s knowledge. It is important to note that
individual’s knowledge has been gained through many years of; school, social interaction,
employment, travel, culture and an individual’s own thought processes. It is also, in their point of
view what is important to be captured. Some examples of explicit knowledge is in the form of
the books, papers, policies, and guidelines that are created for use. These are the results of
individuals’ personal tacit knowledge on the subject matter that has been codified. As Dalkir
(2011) noted, among the amount of information that is available through; books, digital Medias,
and papers only makes up 30% of the tacit knowledge that is available in an organization. The
extra 70% is still not captured in any explicit format.

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The Sources of Individual Tacit Knowledge
Courtesy of webdesignerdept.com
Bloom Taxonomy
Bloom (1956) created knowledge taxonomy into a hierarchical chart that distinguishes
between psychomotor which describes the relation between mental and bodily activities as well
as affective attitudes and the cognitive domains in human. Bloom (1956) stated that verbs
describe the human’s cognitive learnings levels. A humans’ cognitive learning taxonomy
provides the levels of human brain’s development in an academic level. Below portrays the verbs
that are expected from undergraduate and graduate levels after learning the materials.

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BLOOM’S LEVELS OF LEARNING TAXONOMY
(New Version)
Creating
Assemble, Construct, Create, Design, Develop, Formulate,
Evaluating
Appraise, Defend, Judge, Select, Support, Value, Evaluate
Analyzing
Compare, Contrast, Criticize, Differentiate, Distinguish
Applying
Demonstrate, Employ, Interpret, Operate, Solve, Use
Understanding
Classify, Describe, Discuss, Explain, Report, Select
Remembering
Define, Duplicate, List, Memorize, Recall Repeat, Reproduce
Graduate
Upper
Division
Lower
Division

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References
Bloom B. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals.
Handbook I: Cognitive Domain New York, Longmans, Green.
Dalkir, K. (2011). Knowledge management in theory and practice. The MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA & London, UK.
Nonaka, I & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies
create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press, NY