The verbs of Knowledge Management

I posted recently an analysis of KM definitions, concentrating on the nouns. Here is an analysis of the verbs.

RSiegel week 3 by Rebecca Siegel on Flickr

The idea to look at the verbs was suggested by "the other" Nick Milton in the comments to my previous blog post. I took a collection of 65 KM definitions and did a quick word count. 

Here are the results for each verb

Use                                23 appearances

Create                            17

Share                             15

Leverage                       11

Apply                            11

Improve                         11

Access                           10

Manage                           9

Capture                           7

Store                               6

Integrate                         6

Organize                         5

Generate                         5

Analyze                          5

Gather                             4

Transfer                          4

Retrieve                          4

Enhance                          4

Develop                          4

Verbs appearing 3 times - Facilitate, Optimize, Increase, review, Put, Promote

Verbs appearing 2 times - Distribute, Disseminate, Retain, Save, Acquire, Get, Exploit, Accumulate, Collect, Connect

Verbs appearing once - Guard, Grow, Expand, Cultivate, Elicit, Diffuse, Maintain, Understand, Represent, Spark, Comprehend, Formalize

What does this tell us?

It tells us that we, as a collective industry, are far less certain about what we actually do with knowledge, than we are about the knowledge itself. While I had 7 main nouns in my previous analysis, here I have over 50 verbs.  However there are some synonyms here - acquire, get, gather, collect, capture, elicit, are all to some extent synonyms.  We can therefore look at synonym clusters

Verbs associated with the application of knowledge appear 55 times

Retrieve, apply, use, access, review, exploit, understand, comprehend

Verbs associated with the improvement of knowledge, or of the KM process, appear 53 times

Leverage, manage, facilitate, grow, optimise, develop, enhance, expand, integrate, analyse, cultivate, formalise, represent, increase, improve

Sharing verbs appear 29 times

Transfer, distribute, share, diffuse, connect, promote, disseminate

Getting Verbs appear 23 times

Gather, capture, generate, capture, acquire,, get, elicit, collect

Creating verbs appear 22 times

Create, generate

Storing verbs appear 12 times

Store, guard, maintain, accumulate, retain, put, save, organize

So now we have 6 verb clusters, to go with our 7 nouns. At the moment, it seems possible to perm any combination of these into any KM definition you want, but the most generic definition from an analysis of all existing definitions seems to be

"Knowledge Management is the means of Improving the way Knowledge is Created, Acquired, Stored, Shared and Applied".

Simple, boring, but good enough.