Definition of Knowledge Management There are several different, and sometimes quite confusing statements that claim to be a definition

of Knowledge Management' and there are different perspectives on what Knowledge Management is. For example: KM is about systems and technologies KM is about people and learning organisations KM is about processes, methods and techniques KM is about managing knowledge assets KM is a holistic initiative across the entire organisation KM is not a discipline, as such, and should be an integral part of every knowledge workers daily responsibilities What is most important, is for you to have your own definition of Knowledge Management; what KM is to you and your organisation. What is even more important is that you and your colleagues have a 'common shared understanding' of what KM means for you all. To help you get started, we have included immediately below a few definitions of what KM means to some organisations. We suggest you consider them, together with any other definitions you may have, and see if there are any words or phrases that particularly 'resonate' with what you are trying to do. This will help you formulate your own definition of knowledge management. At the end of this page, we invite you to share with us all, any definitions you have discovered and/or formulated. We can then all comment and rate the usefulness of each definition as we wish. This then provides us, at the bottom of this page, with a list of KM Definitions, listed in highest rated/ranked order, to help us even further. So please share your definitions and/or any comments or rating to definitions.

The process of systematically and actively managing and leveraging the stores of knowledge in an organisation is called knowledge management. It is the process of transforming information and intellectual assets into enduring value. www.unisa.edu.au/pas/qap/planning/glossary.asp The process of capturing, organizing, and storing information and experiences of workers and groups within an organization and making it available to others. ... www3.imperial.ac.uk/ict/services/teachingandresearchservices/elearnin g/aboutelearning/elearningglossary

The practice of nurturing, collecting, managing, sharing, and updating the knowledge resources of an enterprise e-Knowledge Marketplaces: Repositories that are set up to encourage and enable the exchange of the elements of e-knowledge. ... www.transformingeknowledge.info/what_is/page2.html Knowledge Management is a set of processes used to effectively use a knowledge system to locate the knowledge required by one or more people to perform their assigned tasks. www.kwbsolutions.com/kbsterms.htm

Some well known KM Definitions "Knowledge Management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire organisations to collectively and systematically create, share and apply knowledge, to better achieve their objectives" Ron Young, CEO/CKO Knowledge Associates International ----------------------------------------------------------------"Most activities or tasks are not one-time events. Whether its drilling a well or conducting a transaction at a service station, we do the same things repeatedly. Our philosophy is fairly simple: every time we do something again, we

should do it better than the last time".

Sir John Steely Browne, BP, Harvard Business Review, 1997. ----------------------------------------------------------------"Knowledge management will deliver outstanding collaboration and partnership working. It will ensure the region maximizes the value of its information and knowledge assets and it will help its citizens to use their creativity and skills better, leading to improved effectiveness and greater innovation". West Midlands Regional Observatory, UK ----------------------------------------------------------------"We recognise that our most important asset is people and their knowledge. We understand Knowledge Management (KM) as the cultivation of an environment within

which people are willing to share, learn and collaborate together leading to improvement". Care Services Improvement Partnership (CSIP) ----------------------------------------------------------------"Knowledge Management ('KM') comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge. It has been an established discipline since 1995 with a body of university courses and both professional and academic journals dedicated to it. Many large companies have resources dedicated to Knowledge Management, often as a part of 'Information Technology' or 'Human Resource Management' departments. Knowledge Management is a multi-billion dollar world wide market. Knowledge Management programs are typically tied to organisational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage innovation, lessons learnt transfer (for example between projects) and the general development of collaborative practices. Knowledge Management is frequently linked to the idea of the learning organisation although neither practice encompasses the other. Knowledge Management may be distinguished from Organisational Learning by a greater focus on specific knowledge assets and the development and cultivation of the channels through which knowledge flows" Wikipedia

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What is knowledge management (KM)?

" Accurate advice may lead to a bigger tip at the end of the day. A knowledge management
plan involves a survey of corporate goals and a close examination of the tools, both traditional and technical, that are required for addressing the needs of the company. The challenge is to select or build software that fits the context of the overall plan and encourage employees to share information.

This major process...

Includes these activities....

Gathering

Data entry OCR and scanning Voice input Pulling information from various sources Searching for information to include

Organizing

Cataloging

Indexing Filtering Linking

Refining

Contextualizing Collaborating Compacting Projecting Mining

Disseminating

Flow Sharing Alert Push

We have developed this one since it identifies some any successful knowledge management program :

critical aspects of

Explicit - Surfacing assumptions; codifying that which is known Systematic - Leaving things to serendipity will not achieve the benefits Vital Knowledge - You need to focus; you don't have unlimited resources Processes - Knowledge management is a set of activities with its own tools and techniques

The Essentials
Customer Knowledge - the most vital knowledge in most organizations Knowledge in Processes - applying the best know-how while performing core tasks Knowledge in Products (and Services) - smarter solutions, customized to users' needs Knowledge in People - nurturing and harnessing brainpower, your most precious asset Organizational Memory - drawing on lessons from the past or elsewhere in the organization

Knowledge in Relationships - deep personal knowledge that underpins successful collaboration Knowledge Assets - measuring and managing your intellectual capital.

Practices
A wide variety of practices and processes are used in knowledge management. Some of the more common ones are shown in the table below: Creativity Techniques Data Mining Text Mining Environmental Scanning Knowledge Elicitation Business Simulation Content Analysis Communities of Practice Learning Networks Sharing Best Practice After Action Reviews Structured Dialogue Share Fairs Cross Functional Teams Decision Diaries Knowledge Centres Expertise Profiling Knowledge Mapping Information Audits/Inventory IRM (Information Resources Management) Measuring Intellectual Capital

Creating and Discovering

Sharing and Learning

Organizing and Managing

Tools and Techniques

A large number of tools, many computer based, are also significantly boosting the effectiveness of knowledge management. We have identified over 80 categories (often overlapping), including: Infrastructure: groupware, intranets, document management, KM suites Thinking: concept mapping, creativity tools Gathering, discovering: search engines, alerting, push, data mining, intelligent agents Organizing, storing: data warehousing, OLAP, metadata, XML

Knowledge worker support: case based reasoning, decision support, workflow, community support, simulation Application specific: CRM, expertise profiling, competitive intelligence

Critical Success Factors

The report Creating the Knowledge-based Business highlights several recurring critical success factors: Knowledge Leadership - a compelling vision actively promoted by senior management Clear Business Benefits - tracking success and developing new measures Systematic Processes - including knowledge mapping and IRM (Information Resources Management) A Knowledge Sharing Culture - teams that work across boundaries Continuous Learning - though pilots and learning networks An effective information and communications infrastructure groupware and other collaborative technologies, such as an intranet

What is Knowledge Management? The term knowledge management was first introduced in a 1986 keynote address to a European management conference (American Productivity and Quality Center 1996). This term had immediate and vast appeal and, at the same time, spawned strongly felt criticism.The key to the knowledge-based economy is not knowledge-infused products but tacit knowledge that provides the capacity for these knowledge-infused products and for non-codified knowledge services (Sveiby 1997). The major criticisms of knowledge management are that: It has traditionally conjured up too close an association with information management and information technology (IT). It implies that knowledge can be managed. It tends to be so broad and vague as to have little meaning. It tends to focus on the nuts and bolts of knowledge creation, capture, sharing, use and reuse, rather than providing a true vision and strategy that conveys how knowledge-based enterprises will function and succeed in the new knowledge-based economy.

The most common type of definition describes knowledge management as a set of processes directed at creating-capturing-storing-sharing-applying-reusing knowledge .

Knowledge engineering reflects this view of knowledge management. A definition with similar problems sees knowledge management as delivering the right knowledge to the right persons at the right time. Knowledge Management: Everyone Benefits by Sharing Information
by Mike Burk

Large organizations know a lot of things, but they dont always know what they know. Consider this scenario: Youre a specialist in construction technology, and you work in a field office of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). A civil engineer at a state department of transportation calls you, requesting information about Superpave asphalt mixture design. You know FHWA has plenty of information about Superpave. But where is it? How do you find it? Whom do you call? The situation is complicated by the fact that knowledge about Superpave exists in a number of forms. Some pavement experts at FHWA have been following Superpave developments ever since the technology was introduced. A good-practices paper was written to document one states experience. Several university researchers have written journal articles about the effects of the environment on Superpave asphalt mixtures How can you be sure, even if you identify one or two sources of expertise, that youve done more than scratch the surface of the available information? Thats the kind of problem faced by thousands of organizations thousands of times a day and its the reason for the development of a concept known as knowledge management.

Implementing Knowledge Management To implement knowledge management, how much does an organization need to change its culture? Some people believe that a wholesale transformation is required in the way people work and act, but this is largely a myth. The fact is that successful knowledge management programs work with organizational cultures and behaviors, not against them. Some staff members feel, at least initially, that they are required to make an extra effort to share knowledge without deriving any benefit from the process. And some

supervisors are uncomfortable with the idea of staff members spending time on knowledge-sharing rather than completing traditional tasks. People begin to realize that by sharing knowledge, they become recognized as people who have expertise in particular areas, says Youman. Knowledge management is not a project that begins and ends, but an ongoing and evolving change in the way an organization operates. Organizations of all kinds in all sectors of the economy are waking up to the fact that what they know more accurately, what individuals within these organizations know is not only of immense value, but it is crucial to their success in this era in which information is a primary product. The transportation community is made up of people of outstanding ability, experience, and professionalism. By improving the way we create, share, and gain access to these experiences and the accompanying knowledge, knowledge management will enable us to raise the level of expertise throughout the community to the mutual benefit of all participants.

Definition of Knowledge Management: A Working Perspective

Knowledge Management (KM) is the set of professional practices which improves the capabilities of the organizations human resources and enhances their ability to share what they know.

Knowledge Life Cycle

Knowledge in business can be seen to have a lifecycle of its own. It must be created either within or outside the organization. This is typically comprised of iterative tacit and explicit loops until the knowledge is
Learn

Create

Store

Use

Find

Acquire

ready for distribution to those outside the creating group. It can then be stored somewhere, either tacitly or explicitly so that it is accessible for others to find and use. Those who need the specific knowledge must then find out where it is, when they need it, by searching in the right places and / or asking the right people. Once the knowledge source is found, the user will then go through the act of actually acquiring it. This will involve gaining personal knowledge from other humans or documented sources. Once acquired, the knowledge can be put to use towards some productive purpose. Having been used, perhaps repeatedly, the user will learn what worked well and not so well as a result of applying the knowledge gained. This can then be taken as significant input into further iterations of the knowledge creation and distribution process.

A key contributor to the effective management of this cycle is the concept of learning. Without the learning component, the cycle is devoid of knowledge. It merely, becomes an information delivery strategy, which becomes disconnected from the leverage of more effective human experience. The application of the delivered knowledge to operating the business (Find, Acquire and Use) will have some initial value but the delivered knowledge will be immediately out of date unless continuously renewed with the latest lessons learned from the application of the delivered knowledge (Learn, Create and Store). Knowledge Management is the management of this cycle for optimal performance across all aspects of the Knowledge six pack.

Optimizing the Knowledge Management Process

The objective of knowledge management is to make this cycle more effective as well as more efficient. This implies that corporate knowledge be made available in forms which are readily accessible. This could take the Lessons Learned Internally form of Knowledge Documents, Documented Processes, and Rules. These could Rules Processes Knowledge Deliver be found embedded in Human Enhanced Resources, Information Knowledge Capability Lessons Technologies, or in the design of Learned Externally Facilities. The embedded knowledge, in this way is accessible for reuse and ongoing evaluation for effectiveness and improvement. This challenge of Operate Business performance I1 O1 Business improvement of the Business Opportunities Results knowledge management lifecycle is critical to organizational Capable Humans Technologies Facilities success, for without it, overall business performance will suffer. Getting the best knowledge through the cycle quickly before it erodes is a major goal of many organizations in intellect-based fast-paced companies.
1 2

This challenge applies at the individual, workgroup, company-wide and inter-company levels. Each new level offers a greater degree of leverage and business results but also brings with it a set of more difficult issues, as long standing ways of doing things must be overcome.
Knowledge management is all about creating and maintaining the optimum environment to make this happen. Knowledge Management closes the loop, which continuously converts tacit knowledge, based on experience into explicit knowledge for wider communication and back into tacit again through inference, experience and learning.

Organizational Changes Lines between departments and operating divisions blur Knowledge management efforts can completely collapse boundaries A knowledge management system cannot work through hierarchies Individual and team learning processes must become the true driver of organizational learning