Wednesday 31 March 2010


Another KM definition



Here's quite a good definition from a recent blog

At the outset of the session at the 2010 ABA TECHSHOW, “Advances in Knowledge
Management,” Toby Brown defined KM as “being able to quickly find and access the
knowledge you need.”

Although this is more a definition of the outcome of KM than KM itself, its not a bad one. You could modify it to read

"Knowledge Management is the management approach to ensuring that staff are able to quickly find and access the knowledge they need"

although even better would be to say

"Knowledge Management is the management approach to ensuring that staff are able to
quickly find, access and apply the knowledge they need"



It still surprises me how little attention is paid to the application of the knowledge - as if being able to access it were enough!


The blog post goes on to restate a point I have made here many times

Brown and Martin delved into some common mistakes that law firms make when starting out on the path toward building a KM environment that works best, including “doing KM for the sake of doing KM.”

“If you want to succeed at KM, I would say you flip things on their head and you
don’t start with ‘What KM system are we going to buy?,’” said Brown. “You start
with ‘What problem are we going to solve?’”


Well said Mr Brown.

See following posts in support of his last statement.


KM is not an end in itself
Are you putting a man on the moon, or just trying out a new mop?
Business focus for KM - the wisdom of 12 years ago

Business driven knowledge management

1 comment:

Md Santo said...

In my view as well as my consideration, KM could defined in two ways, contextually-driven KM definition and content based- driven KM definition which will bring us into the condition where KM is critical factor in Enterprise 2.0


The following are my version on KM definition :

Contextually – driven KM Definition : Knowledge Management (KM) essentially is not management technique but behaving more as an access mechanisms that can be used across any management tool type such as Total Quality Management, Learning Organization, Benchmarking, Process Classification Framework, Business Process Reengineering, Balanced Scorecard, Business Intelligence including Social Media 2.0 platforms etc. wherein each with their specific functions to be orchestrated under KM’s consciousness. So, here we put KM in incredibly broad meaning as subject with higher level than any other management tool type which is treated only as object ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/28696847/How-to-re-postulating-the-paradi... and http://mobeeknowledge.ning.com/forum/topics/why-knowledge-management-has )

Content based – driven KM Definition : KM described as “Human Enlightenment Process-based KM Definition” through the link http://mobeeknowledge.ning.com/forum/topics/human-enlightment-staging and in which KM defined as follow :
1. KM is the staging of Human Enlightenment Process
2. The process is to managing the transformation of Information content as object into Knowledge and beyond as subject (KW concept noted as narrow meaning)
3. The goals are towards Learning, Growth and Innovation
4. The management should leveraged by KM Standards, KM Tools and KM Process Frameworks

Epistemologically, the version on KM definitions above mentioned derived from our paradigm on Knowledge, which is postulated as the analogy with Human System Biology (HSB) applied to KM model called as HSB-based KM (visit our K-Base http://delicious.com/mobeeknowledge/humansystembiology (24 articles) and take attention especially to http://mobeeknowledge.ning.com/forum/topics/the-epistemology-of-human ) and fundamentally rooted from our DI – KW model in which DI separated from KW, not in DIKW as a continuum considering that Knowledge is human knowing tools achieved as inborn as well as acquired (visit our Knowledge-Base on DI – KW Model http://delicious.com/mobeeknowledge/di-kwmodel - 12 articles)

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