Gartner Group's Knowledge Management Glossary

Gartner

Group's Knowledge Management Glossary

The GartnerGroup

Knowledge Management (KM) glossary re-lies extensively on the following

definition: KM is a discipline that promotes a collaborative and integrated

approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of an

enterprise's information assets.






Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO): Articulates and champions the
KM vision, provides enterprise-level leadership to implement and sustain

KM, and is the ultimate focal point for knowledge creation, sharing

and application.






Community of Practice: People associated and interlined in a
communication or knowledge network because of their shared interest

or shared responsibility for a subject area.






Information (Knowledge) Assets: Information relevant to an enterprise's
business function, including captured and tacit knowledge of employees,

customers or business partners; data and information stored in highly-structured

databases; data and information stored in textual form and in less-structured

databases such as messages, email, workflow content and spreadsheets;

information stored in digital and paper documents; purchased content;

and public content from the internet or other sources.






Intellectual (Knowledge) Capital: Intangible assets of an enterprise
that are required to achieve business goals, including knowledge of

employees; data and information about processes, experts, products,

customers and competitors; and intellectual property such as patents

or regulatory licenses.



Knowledge Architect: Oversees the enterprise architecture implementation;
leads the "knowledge architecture team" to identify, organize

and provide access to scattered, heterogeneous information in digital

and paper form, and leads the knowledge audit to determine and continually

re-evaluate the specific knowledge needs of users and their business

processes.






KM Architecture: The technology infrastructure that supports
an enterprise's KM initiatives, including physical (e.g. intranet, knowledge

retrieval tools) and logical (e.g., knowledge maps) dimensions.






Knowledge Audit: A formal determination and evaluation of how
and where knowledge is used in business processes. The audit identifies

implicit user needs, as well as explicit information stores.






Knowledge Capture: Knowledge capture makes tacit knowledge explicit,
i.e., it turns knowledge that is resident in the mind of the individual

into an explicit representation available to the enterprise.






Knowledge Content Owners: Oversee the definition and delivery
of knowledge content for their business processes to the KM environment,

and define access privileges to their knowledge resources.






Knowledge Content Specialists: Refine knowledge content from
the originating owner into the specific product that the knowledge users

require. These specialists have strong skills in the business process

and its knowledge resources, as well as in organizing and filtering

knowledge into a highly accessible and usable form.






Knowledge Creation: Knowledge creation results in new knowledge,
or new assemblies of existing knowledge.






Knowledge Management IT Manager: Implements and oversees the
technology that supports the enterprise knowledge architecture, and

ensures the technical integrity of knowledge content and automated processes.






Knowledge Management Infrastructure: The people, processes and
automated systems required to support KM.






Knowledge Map (K-Map): A representation of concepts and their
relationships (e.g., hierarchy, taxonomy and network). A K-Map is a

navigational aid that enables a user to home in rapidly on the desired

concept, and then follow links to relevant knowledge sources (information

or people).






Knowledge Organization: Knowledge organization is the classification
and categorization of knowledge for navigation, storage and retrieval.








Knowledge Sharing: One of the three subprocesses of the KM process
framework that incorporates three activities: knowledge capture, knowledge

organization and knowledge access.






KM Strategy: A declaration of how the enterprise will use knowledge
to compete, and how KM will support its business strategies.






Knowledge Use: Knowledge use is the application of knowledge
to business decisions or opportunities. Use is also recursive, and continually

generates feedback that affects and is integrated into the other knowledge

activities.






Knowledge Users: Participants in KM programs. They fill the dual
roles of applying knowledge in their work tasks and contributing their

own knowledge and insight to the enterprise knowledge content.






Tacit Knowledge: The personal knowledge resident within the mind,
behavior and perceptions of individuals. Tacit knowledge includes skills,

experiences, insight, intuition and judgement. Tacit knowledge is typically

shared through discussion, stories, analogies and person-to-person interaction.

Therefore, it is difficult to capture or represent in explicit form.

Because individuals continually add personal knowledge, which changes

behavior and perceptions, tacit knowledge is, by definition, uncaptured.






Courtesy: GartnertGroup


(gg.india@gartner.com)