Abstract

In today’s business environment, a knowledge base approach toward all organization’s aspects is inevitable. Having a method for identifying existed knowledge and experiences level and analyzing the need of knowledge acquisition from external sources or research and development to gain new knowledge, the organization will be able to reduce the gap between existed and needed knowledge toward achieving its strategic objectives. This method, which is known as knowledge audit, is an innovative and noteworthy field of research lately and is a basis for all attempts in knowledge management scope. This paper presented a new systematic approach to audit organization’s knowledge and considered tacit and explicit knowledge. So the organization identified its knowledge state and prioritized knowledge fields. Proposed methodology presented a basis for identifying organization’s knowledge state developing solutions toward reaching desired state. At the end of the paper the proposed methodology’s implementation was described in an active Iranian company in industries’ pollution controlling industry.

Key words: Knowledge auditing, knowledge management, tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge.