What is and What is not Knowledge Management

Primary Components

Now, it’s time to break down the primary components of Knowledge Management and how they work to optimize the storage and sharing of information in your business.

An effective Knowledge Management strategy involves several layers in order to fix the information bottlenecks in your business. From collecting information to using that information to make informed decisions, you need the process to be as streamlined as possible.

Primary components of Knowledge Management:

• Collecting
• Organizing
• Summarizing
• Analyzing
• Synthesizing
• Decision Making

KM is not information management, document management, data warehousing, data mining, imaging, yellow pages, content management, bulletin boards, ERM, CRM, BPM or any other form or application of information technology (IT). Nor is it library management, library science, business intelligence, best practices management, social network analysis, quality management, training, or e-learning.

What KM is is a management discipline aimed at enhancing organizational knowledge processing, and as such it is a social (management) science. Its purpose is to enhance an organization’s capacity to detect problems (i.e., epistemic gaps), solve or dispose of them, share or present the solutions to others, mitigate risks as a result, and adapt. It does this by enhancing organizational learning and innovation processes.

Everything else belongs to some other disciplines. KMCI’s research, training, and consulting programs are oriented accordingly.

People often equate knowledge management with other information systems or processes, such as CRM, document management, content management, or sales force automation. There’s no question that knowledge management works hand in hand with all of these, but it focuses on a different function. Simply put, knowledge management is really about retrieving, acquiring, and adapting corporate knowledge. By retrieving I mean the act of finding an answer to a user’s question, not unlike looking up something in a phone book, just a bit more complex. But what if it’s a question for which no answer exists? That’s where acquiring comes in. True knowledge management allows users not only to define the problem and find an answer as part of the search-and-retrieval process, but also to create a new answer when no answer is available, and make it available for others to use again and again. And finally, there’s adapting knowledge, which respects the vastly different approaches that people and organizations use to answer questions. Knowledge management should be able to adapt and mold to the business requirements of the organization, even as those requirements change. When you put all this together–acquiring, retrieving, adapting it becomes clear that through knowledge management, support organizations can answer questions and resolve problems using, reusing, and adding to, information that exists all over the company, which in turn improves the bottom line.