Knowledge Integration - The Practice of Knowledge Management in Small and Medium Enterprises

5 Elicitation – Extracting Knowledge from Experts (S.64)

Antonie Jetter

Chair for Business Administration with focus on Technology and Innovation Management, RWTH Aachen University, Germany, jetter@tim.rwth-aachen.de

5.1 Motivation and Introduction

The activity of elicitation – the explication of unarticulated latent knowledge that the knowledge owner might not even be fully aware of – is an important first step for many knowledge activities, such as codification and transfer of knowledge. Elicitation requires that people are conscious of and successfully express their knowledge and that their expressions are adequately represented and interpreted.

Cognitive psychologists have long been interested in learning and have therefore developed methods to research what people know (knowledge contents), how their knowledge is organized in the human brain (knowledge structures) and how content and structure change in the course of time. Though many of the research methods they use have been adopted in other areas (e.g., marketing, managerial cognition, expert system design), they are still relatively unknown in the field of knowledge management (KM).

Furthermore, some elicitation methods that have originated in psychology are applied in KM with very little consideration for their theoretical background and application domains. Consequently, the knowledge that is captured in KM practice is sometimes only an insufficient representation of expert knowledge. This chapter will briefly discuss the psychological perspective on knowledge elicitation, and its value for knowledge management (Sect. 5.2), before it presents elicitation methods for three distinct steps in the elicitation process (identification of experts, activation and capture; interpretation and documentation) in Sect. 5.3.

In Sect. 5.4 it will then present a case study of a high-tech SME that has applied the elicitation techniques of episodic interviews and free word association for building ontologies for knowledge search and retrieval.

5.2 A Psychological Perspective on Knowledge Elicitation

5.2.1 Theoretical Background

Many researchers in cognitive psychology are primarily interested in the structures of knowledge in the human brain. It is widely accepted that the brain follows the principle of cognitive economy and organizes related knowledge content in struc- tures that can be easily accessed and processed as an entity. Elicitation results (e.g., the speed and order of a test person’s statements) are used to infer these structures [9].

Models of knowledge structures vary greatly. One very influential idea of knowledge organization, e.g., grounds on the notion that de-contextualized knowledge about facts – so-called semantic knowledge (e.g., historical data, the members of the European Union, the differentiating characteristics of mammals) – is organized in network structures. These knowledge structures consist of verbal concepts and propositions about them and are usually represented through graphs, with concepts being the nodes and relations being the edges. The sentences "A tree is a plant", "Plants need sunlight", "Oaks are trees" for example, contain four concepts (tree, plant, sunlight, oaks) that are linked through the relations "is a", "need", and "are".