When charting a new destiny for KM, it is important that we get the basics right. The basics involves understanding what Knowledge is for organizations. Anything and everything within an organization are expressions of knowledge, be that the ability of an employee, approach/process adopted to perform an activity, culture of an organization, how employees come together, the products or services..

We’ve been in the business of Knowledge Management Consulting for the vast majority of years in our experience, one of the most challenging aspects to KM is its intangibility.

we’ve helped an array of organizations to define their Knowledge Management Success Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to make Knowledge measurable and tie it to business value and hard return on investment.

In these cases, though, many of these KM KPIs are only measurable over years and often have a stronger demonstration of value to the organization rather than the individual.

We find that quite often when we say Knowledge Management, we actually mean Content Management or other aspects of explicit knowledge.

That is a logical starting point for most of us, for historical reasons but also because it is the easier of the two knowledge dimensions to quantify and measure both progress and business impact.

What is KM about?

It depends on who you ask and what their experience is with it. Some people/organisations focus on technology, some on people, some on process, a very few recognise that it needs to be a balance among the three, and for good measure also create a strategy to support their plans and ideas and to ensure alignment with the organisation.

But beyond that, what is knowledge management about? Why do we/our organisations do it?

KM Institute partner, Enterprise Knowledge, shares more insight on the application of Design Thinking in development of an organizational KM strategy. . . scroll to bottom of page for info on new course on this topic from KMI.