mibisystems

KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices. It's important to note that the definition says nothing about technology; while KM is often facilitated by IT, technology by itself is not KM.[1]

Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range 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 organizational processes or practice.[2]

In the ITIL core guidance, the purpose of Knowledge Management is simply to ensure that the right information is delivered to the appropriate place or competent person at the right time to enable informed decision.[3] This is about collecting and accessing the information. Knowledge Management can also be about disseminating knowledge: training, for example. The scope in ITIL can be limited to information related to the service management processes and services while Knowledge Management can be scoped to the entire organization.

The service management processes each generate knowledge that should be captured. ITIL envisions several levels of inter-related containers to hold that knowledge. Since in all but the smallest organizations the knowledge base will become large, they are usually held in a variety of information technology tools. The tool will ideally be tailored to the type of knowledge stored because getting the knowledge in is less than half the problem: maintaining it and getting it back out is the remaining problem. This latter problem should not be minimized: knowledge which is not easy to find and retrieve will not be used. Google has raised the bar for searching and finding knowledge.

In general, the following are the kinds of stored knowledge[4]:

·         Document centric

·         Conversation centric

·         Document and records centric

·         Messaging, including email archiving

·         Web content management

Some of this data is structured, like documents, and some is unstructured, like IM conversations. Ideally, a comprehensive Knowledge Management strategy seeks to capture and reuse as much as possible. AFMC has captured several ways of understanding Knowledge management in a presentation on the Air Force Community of Practice site—itself a tool for capturing enterprise knowledge.[5]

Graphically, a Knowledge Management strategy/architecture could look like the following[6]:

Note from the diagram that Knowledge Management can encompass virtually all the knowledge generated within an enterprise. The ECM square is Enterprise Content Management. Its size and location shows that ECM systems do not usually capture all the knowledge in an enterprise. It is important, therefore, that a Knowledge Management strategy is very explicit about its scope.

In an ITIL service management world, the specific stores of knowledge that should be included in such a knowledge management strategy would include the stores generated by the various service management processes.