Tacit Knowledge Externalisation Over Social Intranets: Developing a Conceptual Model

Employees' experiential knowledge is an organisation's superior strategic asset, as by being mainly tacit and thus intangible, it is difficult to copy or substitute. Recently, organisations have been adopting social intranets, intranets featuring social software, to support employees' tacit and explicit knowledge sharing. By enabling employees to connect and communicate in informal and open environments, user-generated social intranets facilitate the conversion from tacit into explicit knowledge. Once externalised, employees' tacit knowledge can be used to increase competitive advantage. However, there is little literature to aid understanding of how social intranets support tacit knowledge externalisation processes among employees. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to outline the potential of social intranets, particularly the combination of social intranet technologies and their methods, in supporting tacit knowledge externalisation among employees. Based on a literature review, this conceptual paper contributes to theory development by integrating the literature on tacit knowledge externalisation and social software concepts. The results show that social intranets may support tacit knowledge externalisation by enabling new methods for converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that were not possible with previous forms of information and communication technologies.