The document summarizes Henry Johansen's master's thesis which examined tacit knowledge management in high reliability organizations through an action research approach. The research tested using interactive media presentations to capture tacit knowledge from subject matter experts. Results found that presenting recordings of employees' work with audio commentary was an effective way to document tacit "how-to" knowledge. This secured the organization's ownership of that knowledge and improved upon current knowledge transfer methods. The organization decided to continue using this approach to capture retiring employees' tacit knowledge.

1. Henry Johansen
Tacit Knowledge Management in High Reliability
Organizations (HRO): An Action Research Approach
17th of December 2014
Master’s Thesis - Master of Science in Information Security

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• Information Security
• Protect information assets from loss of confidentiality,
integrity and availability
• Knowledge and skills of each individual - can be both an
asset and protection mechanism
• Tacit Knowledge
• Belongs to the individual
• Expressed by action
• Captured by observation
• Created by experience
• Most important asset to protect
• Most difficult asset to protect
INTRODUCTION - BACKGROUND
• Explicit Knowledge
• Easily to articulate and
communicate
• Both human, physical and
computer based
• Recorded or captured in a
medium  Information
“How-To-Do” “What-To-Do”
Complementary

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INTRODUCTION - BACKGROUND
• Knowledge Society
• High Reliability Organizations (HRO)
• High grade of special expertise
• Socio-Critical Systems dependent on expert knowledge

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INTRODUCTION - PROBLEM
• Retired Knowledge
• The aging workforce has much knowledge and especially tacit knowledge
that is important to capture and transfer to new younger forces before
retiring
• Tacit Knowledge transferring are time consuming
• Lack of knowledge increase the vulnerability of affected systems
Business/System/Situation/Value Chain
Timeline
Source: Karin Bleken, 2014
http://www.gd.no/lilleha
mmer/article7718503.ece

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INTRODUCTION - RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• Research Question 1:
• How is tacit knowledge transferred in an HRO today?
• Research Question 2:
• What is the State-of-the-Art in tacit knowledge management today?
• Research Question 3:
• Can a Interactive Media platform improve that capturing and
transferring in the HRO?

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RELATED - THEORY
• Knowledge development is to achieve a conversion between tacit and explicit
knowledge through various social processes (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995)
• Nonaka’s four mode of knowledge conversion
Source: Nonaka, I. February 1994. A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organiztion Science, 5(1).
Nonaka’s Spiral of Organizational Knowledge Creation
Nonaka’s SECI model of Knowledge Conversion
State-of-the-art

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METHOD/EXPERIMENT - ACTION RESEARCH (CYCLE ONE)
The cyclical process of action research according to Susman and Evered
Source: Susman, G. I. & Evered, R. D. 1978. An Assessment of the Scientific Merits of Action Research.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 23(4), 582–603. [Online] http://www.jstor. org/stable/2392581

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METHOD/EXPERIMENT - ACTION RESEARCH (CYCLE ONE)
• Literature review
• Qualitative Observations of a Mainframe organization
• Qualitative Interviews of all managers in a Mainframe organization (protected)
• Questionnaire (I) concerning Learning Process and Styles
• Practical test of Interactive Media in a Mainframe organization
• Four screen captured recordings from four systems programmers work
(Incident resolving and change verification and implementing)
• Eighth Interactive Media Presentations evaluated by eight systems
programmer
• Two presentation version of each recording – on different platforms.
Presentations evaluated by experienced systems programmers
• Questionnaire (II) Evaluation of «Interactive Media Presentations»
• with «Likert Scale» and «Open-Ended» questions

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THE ACTION RESEARCH OBJECT
• Mainframe organization with 111 employee
• Mainly Systems Programmer (Technical Experts)
• 88% Male and 12 % Female
• Average age 57 years
• More than 3000 years of experience in summary
• T-shaped

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THE ACTION RESEARCH OBJECT
• Mainframe organization with 111 employee
• Mainly Systems Programmer (Technical Experts)
• 88% Male and 12 % Female
• Average age 57 years
• More than 3000 years of experience in summary
• T-shaped

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RESULT (RQ1) - THE ACTION RESEARCH OBJECT
• Mainframe organization with 111 employee
• Operates according to ITIL® , LEAN and KAIZEN®
• Three most used ITIL process where tacit knowledge are used
and exchanged:
• Incident Management (IM)
• Problem Management (PM)
• Change Management (CM)
• Tacit Knowledge Exchange Arena: (ba Nonaka&Konno/Contex Erden, von Krog & Nonaka)
• Team work / projects
• Regular meeting in professional groups (teams)
• Between two individuals
• Both physically side-by-side and virtually by using
collaboration tools – MS Lync
• In self-organizing network

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RESULT
Source: Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. 1998. The Concept of ’Ba’: Building a Foundation for knowledge
Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. [Online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1225/CMR107
• Orginating ba - Sharing knowledge in real-
time
• Interactive ba – Sharing knowledge
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Cyber ba – Acuire new explicit knowledge
from Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Excersising ba - Create new tacit knowledge
by exercising simultaneously as watching a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation

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RESULT
Source: Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. 1998. The Concept of ’Ba’: Building a Foundation for knowledge
Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. [Online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1225/CMR107
• Orginating ba - Sharing knowledge in real-
time
• Interactive ba – Sharing knowledge on a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Cyber ba – Acuire new explicit knowledge
from a Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Excersising ba – Create new tacit knowledge
by exercising simultaneously as watching a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation

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RESULT
• Orginating ba - Sharing knowledge in real-
time
• Interactive ba – Sharing knowledge on a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Cyber ba – Acuire new explicit knowledge
from a Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Excersising ba - Create new tacit knowledge
by exercising simultaneously as watching a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
Source: Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. 1998. The Concept of ’Ba’: Building a Foundation for knowledge
Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. [Online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1225/CMR107

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RESULT
Source: Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. 1998. The Concept of ’Ba’: Building a Foundation for knowledge
Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. [Online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1225/CMR107
• Orginating ba - Sharing knowledge in real-
time
• Interactive ba – Sharing knowledge on a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Cyber ba – Acuire new explicit knowledge
from a Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Excersising ba - Create new tacit knowledge
by exercising simultaneously as watching a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation

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RESULT
Source: Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. 1998. The Concept of ’Ba’: Building a Foundation for knowledge
Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. [Online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1225/CMR107
• Orginating ba - Sharing knowledge in real-
time
• Interactive ba – Sharing knowledge on a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Cyber ba – Acuire new explicit knowledge
from a Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Excersising ba – Create new tacit knowledge
by exercising simultaneously as watching a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation

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RESULT
Source: Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. 1998. The Concept of ’Ba’: Building a Foundation for knowledge
Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40–54. [Online] http://dx.doi.org/10.1225/CMR107
• Orginating ba - Sharing knowledge in real-
time
• Interactive ba – Sharing knowledge on a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Cyber ba – Acuire new explicit knowledge
from a Interactive Media/e-learning presentation
• Excersising ba - Create new tacit knowledge
by exercising simultaneously as watching a
Interactive Media/e-learning presentation

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RESULT - RETIRED KNOWLEDGE SURVIVES
Business/System/Situation/Value Chain
Timeline

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RESULT SUMMARY
• Research Question 1:
• How is tacit knowledge transferred in the HRO today?
• Observation and Interviews: Project/Team/Individual two-and-two
• Research Question 2:
• What is the State-of-the-Art in tacit knowledge management today?
• Literature review: Nonaka’s SECI model
• Research Question 3:
• Can a Interactive Media platform improve that capturing and transferring in the HRO?
• Test of Interactive Media Presentation in a real situation: Yes
• Asynchronous learning “I can use it whenever it suits me ” – Retired knowledge survives
• In addition to identified improvements of ITIL process CM, PM, IM, KM, ISM, CI
• A framework and methodology for future research

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DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
• Combining work and research in the same organization
• Evaluation group with long experience in the mainframe discipline. No newbie
in the evaluation group.
• Nonaka’s SECI model widely used and accepted in knowledge theory
• Feedback from Evaluation Group
• Presentation with spoken instruction (audio) preferred
• Presentation length - 80 minutes too long?
• Interactive Media Presentation with "How-To-Do" instructions from Screen
Capture Recording of individuals work, makes other individuals able to
perform tasks they otherwise would not have been able to.
• Tacit “How-To-Do” knowledge has been documented and the organization has
secured the ownership of the “How-To-Do” knowledge as Explicit Knowledge
• The current method of capture and transferring tacit knowledge improved

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FUTURES WORKS (ACTION RESEARCH CYCLE TWO)
• Measuring learning outcome
from Interactive Media
presentation
• Cost/Benefit research of
Interactive Media/e-learning
• Interactive Media/e-learning
Performance Analysis by using
Kesti’s Tacit Signal Approach
• The observerd HRO organization
has decided to continue with the
method of tacit knowledge
capturing, tested in this thesis.
Source: Susman, G. I. & Evered, R. D. 1978. An Assessment of the Scientific Merits
of Action Research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23(4), 582–603. [Online]
http://www.jstor. org/stable/2392581

22. Question?

23. Thank you for your attention!