Tuesday 19 June 2007

What is Knowledge Management?

This was one of the questions on my Case Studies in Knowledge Management exam in May.

Here is what I wrote:

There are many definitions for Knowledge Management (KM). Many of these focus on the capturing, organising and storing knowledge and experiences of individuals and groups and making this information available (sharing) to others in the organisation.

For me, the most important aspect of this is the sharing of information. Communication, collaboration and accessibility of the information are key to successful KM. I believe that the “freeing” of information, be it explicit (in documents, folders, intranets etc) or tacit (experts, experiences), to make it visible and accessible to all, allows an organisation to make best use of its intellectual capital.

Enterprise Search, Wiki’s, Document Management Systems, Web 2.0 Intranets, & Communities of Practice are some of the buzzwords associated with KM. All of these contribute towards the “learning organisation”, one which can learn from past success and failures to better its’ future performance. We have seen many examples of these implementations in the case studies during this module and throughout previous modules.

There is also KM at a personal level (PKM), organising ones’ own knowledge. For example, I intend to store documents, papers and conversations with my supervisor on a personal Wiki to enable me to chart my thoughts and progress during my KM dissertation. This will also allow me to implement my 3 key factors above – communication, collaboration and sharing of information.

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