A business intelligence environment was created to further apply the knowledge, allowing Pfizer to predict trends in managed healthcare and strike partnerships with new MCOs. A complete knowledge management initiative not only identifies processes for sharing intellectual capital. It also measures the results. Tacit knowledge, resident in individuals, is typically developed from experience. It is unstructured and informal, making it difficult to communicate.
Explicit knowledge is formal, structured and well documented.
Thus it can easily be communicated. Discrete elements of explicit knowledge and information can be combined and analyzed for gaining perspective. While both tacit and explicit knowledge can contribute to organizational knowledge creation, it is the interaction between the two that creates powerful knowledge patterns. For example, when the Consulting Services group of Infosys Technologies was engaged at one of the world's leading steel companies, the focus was on developing an IT roadmap to facilitate knowledge exchange among 12 diverse operating units. The company had grown through mergers and acquisition to establish manufacturing and marketing operations in the US, Mexico, the Caribbean, Canada, Germany, France, Ireland, Russia and Indonesia.