50 things to do with knowledge; an analysis of verbs in KM definitions

My favourite definition of Knowledge Management is the current ISO definition - "Management with a focus on knowledge". But what activities does this management involve?

RSiegel week 3 by Rebecca Siegel on Flickr

I took an online collection of 65 KM definitions (now no longer available I am afraid) and did a quick word count of the active verbs related to the management of knowledge

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

There are 50 things you can do with knowledge

This analysis tells us that we, as a collective industry,recognise a very wide set of activities releated to knowledge. More than 50 verbs are used, so there are 50 things that you can do with knowledge, that are important enough to appear in someone's definition.

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, 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. If you want to use these to create a generic definition, you could say 

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

Simple, boring, but possibly good enough.

I still prefer the current ISO definition however.