ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the elusive and organic nature of tacit knowledge as an integral social construct that is challenging to measure and assess. Opportunities for measurement will be discussed as they present themselves in the context of teams, networks, and organizations. The healthcare knowledge management literature offers few tools or strategies to successfully track the exchange of tacit knowledge. Literature outside of the healthcare profession provides models, methods, and potential measures to assess tacit knowledge as intellectual capital using tools such as questionnaires, rating scales, interviews, observation, and storytelling. Attempts to specifically measure tacit knowledge sharing, if it is to be measured at all, call for indirect, qualitative, and innovative approaches. Analysis of social and knowledge networks using text mining and text analysis may provide additional insight into designing measures of knowledge sharing effectiveness within distinct communities; however, technologies to accomplish this goal for large-scale enterprise discovery are lacking.
