Friday, 8 December 2017

50 shades of knowledge management reprieved

To mark the return of this blog after a short hiatus, here is another popular post from the past, first published 5 years ago.

  color wheel
The knowledge management world is large and complex, with many different understandings of what the term means, and what it encompasses.

Here is a first-pass map of the Knowledge Management Landscape, and some of the nooks, crannies, islands and archipelagos that make up that landscape.

Or if you prefer, the 50 shades within the KM rainbow.

Lets start down the data end, where the knowledge management landscape meets the border with data management. KM's interest in data comes from combining data through linked data, and looking for the patterns within data, though data mining, so that new insights can be gained. Where this is applied to customer data or business data, then we get into the analogous disciplines of CRM and Business Intelligence.

Next to data comes Information, where knowledge management is involved in several ways. For example the structuring of information, through classification systems (taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies) or information tagging. Or else the retrieval of information, where knowledge management encompasses enterprise search, semantic search, expert systems and artificial intelligence. Or the presentation of information, through intranets, or portals, supported by content management. The presentation of information, as well as the creation of explicit "knowledge objects" is an important component of customer-centric knowledge management, closely allied to the creation of customer knowledge bases and the use of knowledge centred support. Knowledge based engineering is a discipline where engineering design is done based on knowledge models.

The creation of explicit knowledge is a significant part of the KM world, containing many shades of its own. Knowledge retention deals with capture of knowledge from retiring staff aka Knowledge Harvesting), lessons management deals with learning from projects, as do learning histories based on multiple interviews.

Another part of the landscape is the organisational learning corner. This abuts the border with learning and development, but is concerned with learning of the organisation, rather than learning of the individual. In this part of the KM world we find action learning, business-driven action learning, and lesson-learning, plus analogous disciplines such as e-learning, coaching, and mentoring.

Organisational learning abuts the area of knowledge transfer, where we look at dialogue-based processes such as peer assist, knowledge handover, knowledge cafe,  baton-passing, after action review, appreciative enquiry, and so on - processes that are focused on knowledge, but are closely allied to other meeting disciplines.

Knowledge transfer between people - the tacit area, or experience management, takes us into the area of networking. Here we find the communities of practice, the centres of excellence, the communities of interest, and the social networks. The latter, of course, is closely allied to social media - social media being the technology which supports social networks. Then we have storytelling, as a means of knowledge transfer, crowdsourcing, as a means of accessing  knowledge from a wide source, and collaboration as a sort of catch-all term (supported by collaborative technology).

There is a whole innovation area to KM as well - open innovation, creativity, deep-dives etc

The finally we have the more psychological end of knowledge management, where we have disciplines such as epistemology, sense-making, complexity theory, decision-making theory.

Plus of course the part of knowledge management that deals with the lone worker - personal knowledge management.

So there are our 50+ shades of knowledge management - if I have missed any, please let me know through the comments option!

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