What is Knowledge Management?
KM is a framework for designing an organization's strategy, structures, and processes so that the organization can use what it knows to learn and to create value for its customers and community. [see What is KM graphic]

There is no universal recipe for managing knowledge. Each organization would have to think throughA KM framework involves designing and working with the following elements:

• Categories of organizational knowledge
  (tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, cultural knowledge)
• Knowledge processes
  (knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, knowledge utilization)
• Organizational enablers
  (vision and strategy; roles and skills; policies and processes; tools and platforms)

In what sense can we really "manage" knowledge in an organization?

• Create the organizational conditions that enable and promote the creation, sharing, and use of knowledge;
• Design organizational processes and practices that collect and make available knowledge for learning and reuse.

What are the Benefits of Knowledge Management?
Strategically speaking, there are four kinds of benefits from managing knowledge:

• Create new value through new products or services (innovations);
• Enhance current value of existing products (knowledge about customers);
• Reduce/avoid costs/promote reuse (knowledge about processes);
• Reduce uncertainty/increase speed of response (knowledge about the environment).

Can we quantify the benefits?

Organizations that have adopted KM approaches have applied the following metrics:

Speed of response
Time taken to respond to customer needs, requests or problems. Time taken to bring new products or services to market. Time taken to enter new markets.

Reuse of knowledge
Frequency of access and utilization of codified knowledge assets. Avoidance of re-work and "re-invention of the wheel."

Revenues from new products
Proportion of the firm's revenues derived from the sales of new products (recently developed products; products that are less than a certain number of years old).

Employee empowerment and satisfaction
Growth and ability to hire talented staff. Retention of experienced, knowledgeable employees. Span of influence of knowledgeable staff.

What methods and tools have been found to work?

Communities of Practice
Groups whose members regularly share knowledge and learn from each other. Communities of practice (1) share common work activities or interests, (2) recognize the collective value of sharing knowledge, and (3) have developed norms of trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. (Buckman Labs, Clarica, World Bank, Xerox)

Knowledge Repositories
Databases of codified knowledge assets that are systematically organized to facilitate searching, browsing, and retrieval. Knowledge repositories may contain lessons learned, best practices, planning documents, project proposals, marketing presentations, and so on. (Accenture, Ernst & Young)

Expertise Directories
Profiles of employee expertise that are updated, allowing users to find individuals by expertise areas, and to make contact with or present questions to identified experts. (Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft)

Action Reviews
Facilitated processes that occur before, during, and after significant and intensive work activities in which project members collectively analyze and reflect on lessons learned. (US Army, British Petroleum)

Best Practice Replication
Structured processes that collect, codify, and 'push' innovative practices or solutions developed at a particular location to the rest of the organization for possible adoption. (Ford, Shell)

Information Technology
IT plays a major enabling role in most of these applications. IT tools and infrastructure provide communications, database management, information access, and collaboration capabilities.

What is the Difference Between Data, Information and Knowledge?
Consider a document containing a table of numbers indicating product sales for the quarter. As they stand, these numbers are Data. An employee reads these numbers, recognizes the name and nature of the product, and notices that the numbers are below last year’s figures, indicating a downward trend. The data has become Information. The employee considers possible explanations for the product decline (perhaps using additional information and personal judgment), and comes to the conclusion that the product is no longer attractive to its customers. This new belief, derived from reasoning and reflection, is Knowledge.

Thus, information is data given context, and endowed with meaning and significance. Knowledge is information that is transformed through reasoning and reflection into beliefs, concepts, and mental models.

What is the Difference Between Information Management and Knowledge Management?
Information management is the harnessing of the information resources and information capabilities of the organization in order to add and create value both for itself and for its clients or customers.

Knowledge management is a framework for designing an organization’s goals, structures, and processes so that the organization can use what it knows to learn and to create value for its customers and community.

IM provides the foundation for KM, but the two are focused differently. IM is concerned with processing and adding value to information, and the basic issues here include access, control, coordination, timeliness, accuracy, and usability. KM is concerned with using the knowledge to take action, and the basic issues here include codification, diffusion, practice, learning, innovation, and community building.