90 Zyngier, Burstein, and McKay
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The mode of managing and leveraging knowledge in the STDO is within the
scientific tradition of building on what is known in order to create and innovate. Scientific
knowledge is grounded in building evidence based on prior knowledge. The tradition of
publishing new knowledge in scientific journals and reports has created a ready supply
of explicated knowledge that can be leveraged through the management of knowledge
resources. This was acknowledged by staff who told us that “unless we’ve got access
to what’s happened before, you can’t have scientific excellence; unless people were
reinforced — you know — innovation; taking on ideas; standing by; changing our
transfer mode and teamwork” (Informant 2).
This demonstrates several attributes. These are as follows:
- Acknowledgment of the importance of excellence in research practice
- Understanding that knowledge and innovation are substantially built on what was
known before - Understanding that without proper record, an organization will risk recreating work
already done
Tacit knowledge is also implied through this statement about the importance of the
STDO’s attitude to cooperation and teamwork in knowledge creation and innovation.
This underlies its approach to the transfer of tacit forms of knowledge based on
experience and the capacity to extrapolate form prior knowledge to reach a new and
different conclusion. Teams and cooperative work practices facilitate knowledge pro-
duction from the interaction between individuals sharing what they know.
Prior Systems: Explicit Knowledge Capitalization
Prior to the development of the KM strategy in 2000 and the subsequent formation
of the Information and Knowledge Management (IMKM) Board in 2002, there were two
systems for handling explicit knowledge:
- The Library and Information Services who delivered both traditional and online
information management service - The Registries who sought to manage the internal documents of the STDO
While the Library and Information Services are still maintained as a core STDO
service that is delivered at each STDO location, the Registries are no longer considered
as core and it is believed by some that “our systems really have broken down from the
days when we used to have registry files and people would file things ... there were
rigorous rules for how one handled different kinds of correspondence.... You know, there
was minutes and there was letters, if you had a significant phone call you had to write
that down. All these things got put on files and there were rules for how all that worked
and everyone understood the rules and it was almost like every registry file told a story.
If you got involved in a story and you were asked to do something, the first thing you
would do was find a file and start reading and that’s when you knew what you needed
to do or the background to what you’ve been asked to do and that I think was a very
powerful thing” (Informant 6).
The structures that controlled the management of one form of explicit organizational
knowledge — the client file — have been substantially abandoned since 1994. Client files
were controlled by a manual registry system that controlled correspondence, minutes,