A seminal paper in the academic literature on organizational learning was Ikujiro Nonaka's 1994 article in Organization Science. In it, Nonaka eloquently describes how personal and codified (externalized) knowledge work together across individuals and organizations to create a "knowledge spiral". This is a compelling idea: individual learning followed by codifying some of that learning, which frees up the individual to leave behind that which can be codified to others so that she/he can learn new things. Mentoring processes can work this way. They have two benefits: one, they train a new mentee; and two, they free up the mentor to do more challenging, creative work so that he/she can learn more.
There is a new tool in the works that can aid a knowledge spiral process substantially: "intentional software". This is software that seeks to capture the intent behind knowledge work by making software development accessible to non-developers. There's an interesting article in a recent issue of Fortune magazine that describes the phenomenon (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/11/out-of-this-world-software-engineering/) and the company that is seeking to develop it (http://intentsoft.com/index.html). The company "Intentional Software" is led by Dr. Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft alumnus who has been working on this project for some time.
It's an exciting idea for knowledge development, obviously. If top knowledge workers could more easily codify their work, such knowledge could be shared more broadly, and it could lead to all sorts of new knowledge being developed. It's interesting, too, to think of the intellectual capital in knowledge workers being made more divisible not by sharing it with other knowledge workers, but rather by putting it into a machine. As goes the factory worker, so goes the knowledge worker, perhaps!
We'll see. That's actually right in the same area as my doctoral thesis, building systems to capture that kind of design information. The biggest problems aren't technical, but social. That is, getting engineers to actually write prose. Any such system must provide clear benefits to the engineers, not just management, or it won't be used.
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