Connect and Collect in Knowledge Management - useful table

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In a recent blog post I talked about charts and pilots, explicit and tacit, and briefly touched on Connect and Collect. Here is some more detail about these two approaches, and what is distinct about each one.

Everything is Connected by Richard P J Lambert on Flickr

These two approaches to knowledge transfer are the connect approach, where knowledge is transferred by connecting people, and the collect approach, where knowledge is transferred by collecting, storing, organising and retrieving it). Each method has advantages and disadvantages, as summarised in the table below. Effective Knowledge Management strategies need to address both these methods of knowledge transfer. Each has its place, each complements the other.

	Connect	Collect
Advantages	Very effective Allows transfer of non-codifiable knowledge Allows socialization Allows the knowledge user to gauge how much they trust the supplier Easy and cheap	Very efficient. Allows systematic capture Creates a secure store for knowledge Knowledge can be captured once and accessed many times
Disadvantages	Risky. Human memory is an unreliable knowledge store Inefficient. People can only be in one place at one time People often don’t realize what they know until its captured	Ineffective. Much knowledge cannot be effectively captured and codified. Capturing requires skill and resource Captured knowledge can become impersonal Captured knowledge cannot be interrogated
Types of knowledge suitable for this form of transfer	Ephemeral rapidly changing knowledge, which would be out of date as soon as its written down  Knowledge of continual operations, where there is a large constant community Knowledge needed only by a few	Stable mature knowledge Knowledge of intermittent or rare events High-value knowledge Knowledge with a large user-base
Organisational demographics which suit this approach	A largely experienced workforce	A largely inexperienced workforce
Comments	One traditional approach to Knowledge Management is to leave knowledge in the heads of experts. This is a risky and inefficient strategy.	A strategy based only on capture will miss out on the socialization that is needed for culture change, and may fail to address some of the less codifiable knowledge.