The entire business model from Dell is entirely dependent on knowledge management and its effective use as part of their build-to-order strategy (Gunasekaran, Ngai, 2009). Part 2: The Senior Manager, Enterprise Systems at Cincom Systems interviewed for this second part of the paper. His name is Louis Columbus. This manager uses a wide variety of tacit and implicit knowledge management techniques and tools to capture the specific configurations of customer systems installed, in addition to capturing the lessons learned from each customer implementation. This person's role in the organization is to combine tacit and implicit knowledge into a common framework which can be used by the professional systems organization to better serve customers. This person's role is also highly focused on making sure the sales and support teams have the necessary information they need. Their role crosses between it and sales, marketing and professional services often. It is evident that the many configurations and customizations of systems that Cincom sells takes an inordinate amount of effort to catalog and measure their many options and also capture customer-specific requests. The Senior Manager, Enterprise Systems is heavily involved in cataloging these using a standard database....

The tacit knowledge is captured in database form, while the implicit knowedlge is captured in text-based files appended to the database. This is inefficient and looses about 70% of the value of the data.
The potential exists to create a much more collaborative platform for capturing implicit knowledge throughout the company. There is also significant potential for creating an entirely new series of workflows for capturing tacit and implicit knowedlge as well. Using a variety of technologies and programs, it would be possible for example to create an entirely new platform of knowledge management, one that captured both tacit and implicit knowledge.

References

Organizational team learning at Apple, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. (1998). Human Resource Management International Digest, 6(4), 30-32.

Gunasekaran, a., & Ngai, E.W.T. (2009). Modeling and analysis of build-to-order supply chains. European Journal of Operational Research, 195(2), 319.

Holweg, M., & Pil, F.K. (2001). Successful build-to-order strategies start with the customer. MIT Sloan Management Review, 43(1), 74-83.

Lynn, G.S. (1998). New product team learning: Developing and profiting from your knowledge capital. California…