Explicit knowledge and information are not the same thing

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Compartilho outra postagem, feita em 12.01.2010, no grupo Knowledge Management Experts do Linkedin.

Forte abraço

Fernando Goldman

I'm really surprised to note that there is a minimum of convergence on basic concepts.

I thought that at least there was already consensus among experts that the explicit knowledge can not be called information, simply because they are not the same thing.

In fact, they are very different things and to understand this is very important.

A simple argument to show that they are not the same thing is that there is no direct conversion between explicit knowledge and information.

It is possible that someone has knowledge, a capability for effective action and decision-making, and that, although able to do so, this someone did not explicit this knowledge in some form of information possible, whether spoken, written, danced and so on.

Similarly, information available does not guarantee that anyone who has access to it is able to transform it into knowledge. This is possible only if the necessary context to transform it into knowledge is present.

I would like to suggest who still has doubts in this regard the papers of Firestone and McElroy (in particular to differentiate tacit, implicit and explicit knowledge) or Snowden (to better understand the importance of context). See a lot of them in Google.