What Is Knowledge Management

What is Knowledge Management? Introduction* Generally, knowledge is interpreted, subjective information within a context, which involves understanding and is mostly tacit, not explicit. Knowledge can take many forms. It can be in the form of thoughts, insights, ideas, lore, lessons learnt, practices, and experiences undergone to name just a few. The term knowledge management has become common in businesses throughout the world. Despite its increased prevalence, there remains a large degree of confusion concerning the applied definition of what knowledge management is. Within the knowledge management community, attempts at defining this elusive term appear to be in constant flux. However, a basic description of what constitutes knowledge management, and the various factors leading to its importance, source, problems, and other basic related issues necessary to achieve a general understanding have been provided below. This field guide is intended to provide information concerning these issues in terms that are applicable in any situation. Obviously each business has their own sets of definitions, applications and style with respect to this tool. What is Knowledge Management?* There are prevalent definitions of knowledge management needing to be highlighted. First, that knowledge management (KM) is the discipline that enables productive generation, retention, sharing and maintenance of knowledge to improve the decision-making process and resulting actions. Alternatively, one can state that knowledge management is the process by which individual learning and experience can be accessed, reflected upon, shared, and utilized in order to foster enhanced individual knowledge and, thus, organizational value. It is an approach to managing thoughts, insights, ideas, lessons learnt, best and worst practices, experiences made available, etc. Managing this knowledge requires that knowledge is captured where it is created, shared between people and applied in