Tacit to explicit

Abstract

In the Information System field, the articulation of the mental models business managers use to make decisions is problematic because this knowledge is often tacit. Cognitive mapping can be used to transform tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how this is achieved. It is argued here that cognitive mapping not only externalizes tacit knowledge, but also has an effect on the tacit knowledge itself: tacit knowledge can be transformed, reorganized, or reconstructed during the process of constructing an external representation.