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)