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General Knowledge is codified and stored in databases, where it can be accessed and used easily by anyone in the company. Knowledge is codified using a people-to-documents approach: it is extracted from the person who developed it, made independent of that person, and reused for various purposes His codification strategy is intended to collect, codify, and disseminate information. It relies heavily on information technology. One of the benefits of the codification approach is the reuse of knowledge. According to Davenport and Prusak the aim of codification is to put organizational knowledge into a form that makes it accessible to those who need it.It literally turns General Knowledge, into a code to make it as organized, explicit, portable, and easy to understand as possible. The codification strategy has been named and described in different ways by various authors. Hansen, Nutria, and Tierney published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled "What's your strategy for managing knowledge?" In this article, they describe how different companies focus on different practices and strategies in order to manage their knowledge. The first approach is called codification, where the strategy centers on the computer: Illustrate this strategy with the case of two consulting companies, Anderson Consulting and Ernst & Young, which adopted this strategy due to the fact that their activity mainly focused on implementation projects rather than on purely innovative projects. Stephen Denning former of the World Bank describes two different ways of sharing knowledge: the collecting dimension and the connecting dimension. The collecting dimension is described as the "capturing and disseminating of know-how through information and communication technologies aimed at codifying, storing and retrieving content, which in principle is continuously updated through computer networks, Leading Edge Total About General Knowledge, Management Solution" developed by an European consortium, incorporates such an approach. Know-Net calls it the product view and the process view. The product-view approach is described as focusing on products and artifacts containing and representing knowledge. This implies the management of documents, and their creation, storage, and reuse in computer-based corporate memories. The competitive strategy is to exploit organized, standardized, and reusable knowledge. Natarajan and Shekhar present two models, the transformation model and the independent model, that clearly comply with the previous descriptions. The transformation model deals with explicit knowledge, relying mainly on document capture, structured databases, knowledge-extraction tools, text mining, and search and retrieval applications. A Lotus white paper, describing KM and collaborative technologies, categorizes KM applications as distributive or collaborative: "Distributive applications maintain a repository of explicitly encoded knowledge created, and managed for subsequent distribution to Knowledge consumers within or outside the organization as we can observe, all these descriptions and definitions are very closely related in depicting a codification strategy. For the remainder of this article, we will adopt the codification naming in order to refer to the type of approaches previously described.
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