Thursday, 4 November 2010


The three distinct KM areas of focus


Another snippet from Larry Prusak last week.

Larry says that there is so much confusion between KM and IM, that when he is talking with organisations, he quickly turns the conversation away from KM in general, to two topics in particular

Innovation
Collaboration.
Larry says that everyone can understand these terms more clearly than "knowledge management", and he believes that most of KM can fit under these two categories.

Personally, I would add a third one

Learning from experience.

I think this is sufficiently distinct from collaboration that it needs its own category. But otherwise, I think the Big Man speaks truth (as usual). While KM is such a fuzzy term, lets focus on what's distinctive about KM, and where it's different from document management, information management, etc etc. And these three areas of focus are distinctive enough to start off most conversations.

2 comments:

Stephen Dale said...

I quite liked this definition of the difference between IM and KM - simple but to the points:

"IM is about organising stuff.....KM isn't"

Nick Milton said...

Thanks Steve - nice one!

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