Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

Strategically support your greatest assets: your people and what they know

What it is

Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning are a strategy, processes, and enabling tools used in an organization to identify, create, distribute, and enable implementation of better procedures because the organization is able to take advantage of staff experience. The experiences represent knowledge, embodied in individual staff and embedded in organizations as procedures, processes or practices.

How it helps

The motivations that lead organizations to undertake a Knowledge Management or an Organizational Learning effort include the desire to reduce or eliminate mistakes in the enterprise, facilitate and manage innovation, leverage the expertise of people across the organization, retain expertise of individuals leaving the organization, or more efficiently solve difficult problems. Knowledge sharing remains a challenging issue as barriers include issues around making time for knowledge work, trust and culture in the organization, and simplicity of support technologies.

Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management at work

Knowledge Management efforts can overlap with Organizational Learning in the classic and precise definitions of each discipline. In practice, organizations that are undertaking initiatives in these areas may be using techniques in both disciplines depending on their needs and objectives. In the next pages of this website, I will share my corporate experiences in Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning. I will discuss how we distinguish between the two disciplines, when it may be important to make that distinction, and I will provide a summary of the processes and techniques I have evaluated and/or used since I began working in this area in earnest around 2006.

Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management at work

Several references to scholarly articles are made in this website. A full reference to each citation is listed in the summary and resources page.

What it isn't

Neither Knowledge Management or Organizational Learning is Information Management (IM) or Content Management (CM). IM and CM systems and tools can be considered required in large enterprises today. Experts in IM and CM are key contributors to excellent KM/OL strategies. But IM or CM alone are not enough in large enterprises, especially those with distributed businesses and people that use the same or similar processes to accomplish the activities of the business.

Information Management

Collecting and managing information from one or more sources and ensuring that information is distributed to users is important. It a core attribute of information management, and it is used by knowledge managers as an enabling tool. However, it alone isn't Knowledge Management or Organizational Learning.

Comprising files and file maintenance (to include paper, electronic, and other media) information management is a powerful resource. Depending on the information, information management may also include data management. People working in this area are increasingly concerned with security, processing speed, and document size because of bandwidth concerns when storing and providing access for electronic information.

Information or Data Management won't be discussed further as a standalone discipline. For more information, visit What is Information Management from AIIM, The Association of Information and Image Management, a global, non-profit, community of information professionals providing education, research, and certification for information professionals. I also recommend the Information Management Body of Knowledge website, a handbook created from a research project performed jointly from two universities in South Africa.

Content Management

Primarily concerned with collaborative processes required to create or update an individual work, content management processes and technologies are those that support collection, managing, and publishing information into coherent works. Anytime content is created, and especially by more than one person, or in longer than one session, content management processes and technologies are important to use. Version control, editing, and publishing are parts of the content management process. After a work is completed, content management remains important with processes such as access control. Digital documents are particularly susceptible to the need for content management, and much about this discipline will include managing the look and feel of content delivered over the internet. Equally important, content management concerns itself with policies around deletion or removal of content.

Content management is also a core attribute in the information continuum, without it there would be no clear way to ensure groups of people are using agreed upon materials for organizational learning. This discipline is important, however, as stated in the information management description, it alone isn't Knowledge Management or Organizational Learning.

Content management won't be discussed further as a standalone discipline. For more information, visit CM Professionals website. CM Pros is a collaborative community focused on advancing the field of content management.