What Knowledge Management Is

Every organisation knows things. Its people know how to fix the old pump that always leaks. They know which customer wants a phone call instead of an email. They know why the warehouse is laid out the way it is, and what went wrong the last time a big order was rushed. Most of this knowledge lives in people’s heads, in old emails and in conversations at the coffee machine.

Knowledge management is the planned way an organisation finds, keeps, shares, uses and improves what its people know, so that the organisation works better. It is not a computer system and it is not a library. It is a set of habits, roles and simple tools that help the right knowledge reach the right person when they need it.

The four activities

Most knowledge management work falls into four simple activities:

• Find — know what knowledge matters and who holds it.
• Capture — write down, record or otherwise keep the knowledge that should not be lost.
• Share — move knowledge between people, through documents and through conversations.
• Apply — use the knowledge to make a better decision or do the work better, and learn again from the result.

The fourth activity is the one people forget. A shared drive full of reports that nobody reads is not knowledge management. It is storage.

Who this course is for

This is a beginner course for team leaders, managers, project staff, and people in quality, human resources (HR), training or operations roles who have been asked to help their organisation share what it knows. You do not need any technical background. The examples come from offices, projects, plants, hospitals and logistics companies.

There is an international standard for knowledge management systems, ISO 30401, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This course names it so you recognise it, but it does not teach the standard’s requirements and it does not prepare you for certification against it.