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