Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping of Factors Influencing Success of Experts' Organizational Knowledge Acquisition

Implicit knowledge is the knowledge that emerges from the experience of an individual, group, or organization, over time, through processes of action and daily working realities. Many techniques have been developed to extract implicit expert knowledge, each tailored to the specific circumstances taking into account the type of knowledge, expert knowledge, and characteristics of the environment. Despite extensive research and numerous operational plans to document and extract expert knowledge, many internal and external organizations are challenged with knowledge acquisition. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the aspects and factors affecting the success of knowledge acquisition in the form of fuzzy cognitive mapping to extract and document expert organizational knowledge.

Cognitive mapping, which is a useful method for problem-solving, helps decision-makers to analyze hidden causal relationships and to find the optimal solution. This mapping contains fuzzy graphing structures to illustrate causal arguments. For the purpose of fuzzy cognitive mapping, executive and academic experts in Imam Hossein University were interviewed in the field of knowledge and research.

The results show that factors of knowledge engineering team, selection of techniques and tools for acquiring knowledge, determining the type of knowledge, identifying the required knowledge and affecting organizational factors, respectively, and having the largest causal values, have the greatest impact on the success of organizational knowledge acquisition.

The use of fuzzy cognitive mapping -a soft approach in operational research- is the main innovation of the present research in the subject of expert knowledge acquisition.