Documentation of Organizational Knowledge: The Analysis of the Theoretical Principles and Practical Strategies

The aim of this study is to analyze the theoretical foundations, the concept, documentation history, steps and the procedure of documentation of knowledge on the basis of life cycle of organizational knowledge and the introduction of automatic and semi-automatic operational strategies of the extraction of tacit knowledge and coding or the representation of explicit knowledge.
This paper is an overview-analysis which is done using the library method and the theoretical sources analysis.
Findings: In this study, based on the postulate that without extracting and documenting knowledge, knowledge management will find no objective expression in any organization, the literature and history is analyzed to document the organizational knowledge. To our knowledge, it became clear that the Iranian organizations are not in good conditions regarding the knowledge documentation. One of the most important reasons for this problem is that organizations are not familiar with the documentation procedures and the lack of knowledge about its practical strategies. In order to meet these organizational issues in this research first it is tried based on the postulate that the process of documenting the patterns will follow the life cycle of corporate knowledge to introduce the most important cyclical patterns and to analyze the process of documenting based on the life cycle pattern. The next step, regarding the necessity of organizations’ familiarity with the operational strategies of extraction of tacit knowledge and coding or the representation of explicit knowledge along with referring to the variety and selection criteria of each strategy, the most important practical strategies in both automatic and semi-automatic individual and group level under the title strategies of generation/analysis protocol were introduced. In the end, some recommendations are provided based on the research findings.