What is KM?

It has been my experience while creating and helping organizations develop effective knowledge management strategies and systems, that there is a distinct and repeatable knowledge creation cycle or process. Individual organizations may apply different terminology to the process, but the process follows much the same path in most organizations. This creation cycle is the first of five processes accomplished within the larger context of the knowledge management process. The five processes of knowledge management are Creation, Capture/Harvest, Organize, Share, and Refine.

What is Knowledge Management?

See Brad Hoyt, KM News editor, defining KM in a video

I know this may seem a bit redundant for a publication about knowledge management, but I believe it is important to share a common understanding of what is meant when I use the term Knowledge Management. In reality, there are as many definitions of knowledge management as there are practitioners, so to provide a shared context for this article, I will define knowledge management as follows:

Knowledge management is about connecting people to people and people to information to create competitive advantage.

The intersection of these connections is where creativity spawns innovation and thus establishes competitive advantage. I refer to this as connectedness, and is accomplished through what I have come to call Community-based Knowledge Management.

Knowledge or know-how, is contextual and ranges in form from codified or codifiable (explicit knowledge) to experiential (tacit knowledge).[i]

Examples of codified knowledge are information in databases, data warehouses/marts, previous work product, documents, and software code. Examples of experiential knowledge include techniques and insights gained from personal experiences and interactions.

[i] Arthur Andersen (rip) used the terms convergent & divergent and based their thinking on that of Professor Johan Roos of IMD and his identification of the ways that people tend to frame knowledge.