Quest for the KM Chimera

"Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's Superman!  Like the mythological Chimera, Knowledge Management seems to be made of many different aspects of business.  In turn, people perceive it differently - interpreting it in as many different ways as they perceive it.

Knowledge Management may be simply defined as a set of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizations as processes or practices.

Any tool or system that facilitates one or more these components will likely get categorized under the broad ambit of Knowledge Management.  For example, if we were to look at the various tasks, then the tools that will get covered under this would include:

·         Identify insights and experiences - Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, Data Mining, e-Discovery, Search Engines

·         Create, Represent and Distribute - Content Management Systems, Taxonomy Classification tools and methods, Social Collaboration tools et al

·         Enable adoption of insights and experiences - Learning Management tools, Business Process Management tools, et al

A few of them perform one or more of these activities in a very narrow slice of the overall business - like Customer Support and Service, Customer Relationship Management, or Infrastructure Management.  Most others work best in one of the above with the ability to feed into the other aspects of the definition - for example, BI enables identifying insights, but the rest of the activities are mostly carried out outside of the scope of a BI tool.

Although I have listed Learning Management tools and BPM tools under the third aspect of KM definition, in reality these happen in a very passive manner, disconnected from the definition of KM itself.  BPM tools, especially are good at defining business rules and changing processes that can cause improvement in performance, but will not be able to relate to the actual experience or insight that caused this change.  Similarly, LMS tools can impact learning and enhance competencies in people but will not be able to measure the performance enhancement.

Any organization looking on the path of operational excellence will look at integrating one or more aspects of this into their process and people improvement initiatives.  However, depending on the level of automation of business processes and the KM maturity, their choice of Knowledge tools will vary. Depending on the urgency and level of maturity all of these applications will typically end up vying for the same slice of the budgetary pie (as opposed to the budget available for core and peripheral applications that are more transactional in nature)

A Knowledge Management tool, should ideally straddle all three aspects of the definition either in collaboration with other tools, or as a stand-alone tool.  The ability to adopt insights and cause a shift in the way the organization works at the process and people level, is really where Knowledge Management will become a key driver of Business strategy and Performance improvement.

What tools do you know of, which serve one or more of these functions in a seamless manner?