Knowledge management just seems inordinately complicated sometimes, doesn’t it? Like there are so many disparate pieces to the puzzle that we’re not even sure what they all are sometimes.
I was doing some thinking over the past week about the reasons for this complexity — and what strikes me as a major reason is the amount of other disciplines that knowledge management gets its fingers into.
Within these disciplines, there are all kinds of complex concepts and subdisciplines as well. I decided to sit down and write out as comprehensive of a list as I could, along with a short description of that concept, discipline or subdiscipline’s connection to knowledge management.
I’ve come up with 51 items so far — and I’m very sure that there many I’ve forgotten. So if you happen to be browsing the list and see something else that should be in there, by all means, let me know.
1. Artificial intelligence – Figuring out how we can complement human decision-making or reasoning with technology.
2. Behavioural change – Changing the behaviours of individuals so that these behaviours are more productive to the individual and the enterprise.
3. Blogs – How we integrate blogs into people’s work lives and into the enterprise.
4. Change management – How we deal with any types of changes (from personal to enterprise-wide) in a positive, productive manner.
5. Classification – How we organize content through metadata once we’ve collected it.
6. Cleansing – Scrubbing undesirable information from documents before they are reused.
7. Collaboration – How to get people to work together efficiently on projects.
8. Communication – Ways in which messages pass from person to person and within groups.
9. Communities – All types of communities, whether they’re communities of practice, communities of interest, virtual or not.
10. Competitive intelligence – Basically, finding out what your competitors are doing.
11. Content management – How we manage all the electronic stuff that an enterprise produces.
12. Customer relationship management – How the people and processes in place to deal with customer relationships work (and how they can be improved).
13. Cultural change – How, as an organization, we deal with change within the organizational cultural context.
14. Data mining – Finding useful patterns in heaps of data that can aid in decision-making.
15. Documentation – Clearly documenting processes for others.
16. Document management – Essentially, managing documents. It’s sometimes confusing as to where content, records and document management begin and end.
17. Expertise directories – Collections that describe what individuals know about a particular subject and to locate those individuals.
18. Feeds – Using RSS or other feed standards to deliver information to a reader.
19. Findability – How we make all the content and information that we’ve organized using metadata findable in a search engine or through browsing.
20. Information architecture – How we structure information to achieve a goal, whether that’s findability, ease of access or another goal.
21. Information management – How we manage information from a broad strategic context down to individual documents and data.
22. Information security – How we keep our information safe from those who shouldn’t see it.
23. Innovation – Fostering an environment that encourages people to think outside of their normal limitations.
24. Intellectual capital – The cumulative intellectual property and capacity to create property that makes up an organization.
25. Knowledge collection – How to collect the knowledge that people share.
26. Knowledge mapping – Also sometimes called a knowledge audit. It’s basically just figuring out where knowledge comes from and what its flow through the organization is.
27. Knowledge sharing – How we get people to share what they know.
28, Knowledge reuse – How we reuse what we or someone else already knows in a new, innovative way.
29. Metadata – The information about information that makes the latter findable.
30. Metrics – Tracking who access and uses what in order to better utilize and organize resources.
31. Narrative and storytelling – Using stories and narrative to convey lessons and experiences that improve business performance.
32. Network analysis – Determining not only what your current social network looks like, but also identifying the strong points and gaps that exist.
33. Organizational learning – How we get the people within an organization to be adaptive and constantly learning new techniques and methods for getting work done.
34. Outsourcing – Determining if there are less expensive and more effective locations or people to conduct knowledge work.
35. Portable information delivery – Delivering information, news or data to portable devices.
36. Portals – The aggregate place where we collect all the information that may be relevant to employees of an organization.
37. Records management – How we manage, retain and discard the stuff that an enterprise produces.
38. Search – This is really the technology that makes a search engine work, which also relates to findability and metadata.
39. Semantic web – The movement towards a natural language web where we can freely exchange data and knowledge using common easily-understood standards.
40. Social networking – Getting people throughout (and outside of) the organization to connect.
41. Succession planning – How we deal with people leaving the organization, and the knowledge that goes with them.
42. Taxonomy – A specific often-hierarchical way of organizing information.
43. Team building – How to get teams to coalesce and function more effectively.
44. Technology adoption – How to make sure that technologies we invest in actually get used.
45. Technology standards – Using open standards to exchange information from system to system (such as XML).
46. Training – Making sure that people understand the processes and technologies that we implement.
47. Usability – Making sure that interfaces and technologies are useable and efficient.
48. User roles – The individual roles that users have within a system.
49. Vocabularies – Determining a consistent, agreed-upon language for how we describe the business our organization does.
50. Web 2.0 – How we integrate collaborative technologies into the web and intranet environment.
51. Wikis – How we use collaborative editing to solve business problems.
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September 24th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Hi Lucas – a great resource but a couple of corrections… a taxonomy doesn’t have to be a hierarchy, and doesn’t have to be manifested in metadata. It’s simply a scheme for organising content so that it can be navigated and accessed easily. Also, records management does not deal only with paper records, but with any document digital or physical that reflects the decisions or activities of an organisation (where you will likely need to refer to it again beyond its immediate use).
September 24th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Both good points Patrick — as I said, it’s very difficult to provide a concise explanation of these concepts within a sentence.
As for the taxonomy point, I should have emphasized that taxonomies are predominantly organized in hierarchies — but you’re right, a hierarchy is not necessary for a taxonomy. I’ll make that change in the entry. As for the metadata aspect, I wanted to also emphasize that taxonomies are often used as specific ways to organize metadata. However, there are certainly many other cases where a taxonomy may be useful.
And as for records management, I thought about the emphasis on the retention and disposal of documents within the scope of the definition. Electronic records management exists as its own subdiscipline, so you’re right — records management does not just consist of paper documents.
Thanks for your comment.
September 24th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
I’ve now edited both of these entries — I think they now better reflect the true definitions of what they’re about. Thanks again for your comment Patrick — this is exactly the type of comment that improves a list like this.
September 24th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
A very informative and detail list of areas that Knowledge Management connects with. I was just thinking these 51 items should be the tags that should be pop-up in a visible search engine like quintura. Great descriptions too.
September 25th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Thanks Vijeesh! I actually wasn’t even aware of Quintura, but I think that would be a really cool idea to present these as tags in a tag cloud. Thanks again for your comment.
September 29th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
[...] Read the full article here [...]
October 1st, 2007 at 11:55 am
[...] McDonnell collects and presents 51 pieces of the knowledge management puzzle, i.e. specific applications, instruments, approaches and tools. If the list makes one thing clear, [...]
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:10 am
Another interesting article! Thanks for the post.
Cheers,
Arjun.
October 12th, 2007 at 4:44 am
Pleased to see recorded information management incorporated into the puzzle. I prefer that terminology because it avoids misunderstanding about the nature of recorded information which is, as Patrick points out, a multimedia resource. There is too much focus, however, on “documents” and means to excluded classes of information from most RM and RIM programs. The management of recorded information in accord with its value to business, expressed as an equation in time, is frankly fundamental to KM. That’s an understandable resource management gambit–but the consequences can be serious.