3-4-Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is an established field that recognizes the intellectual capital of an organization as an asset to be managed to advance the organization’s objectives.

Knowledge management refers to a variety of techniques for building, leveraging and sustaining the agency’s body of knowledge and the experience of its employees and partners, which enables it to act in an intelligent way. It includes both tacit “know-how” as well as access to explicit knowledge that has been codified.⁹

As illustrated in figure 3.1, knowledge is developed through learning – which can happen when an individual reads a document, participates in a training course, shadows another employee, or collaborates with his/her peers. Knowledge management is closely related to information management. Whereas information management considers how information is stored, categorized, organized and accessed, knowledge management is more about what people know and how this knowledge can be leveraged by the organization.

Knowledge management includes mechanisms to capture and transfer knowledge, reuse existing knowledge, participate in communities of common practice and other opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing, and the use of IT and management systems for maintaining knowledge bases.

Knowledge management strategies are integral to agency capability-building. They help agencies to better respond to a rapidly changing environment through identifying, creating, capturing and sharing relevant knowledge.

Done well, knowledge management offers a repeatable, proven way to conduct business and meet customer needs that takes into account historical context, experiences and lessons learned.

Other organizational benefits of knowledge management include:

• Systematically understanding and addressing an organization’s knowledge gaps
• Improving collaboration
• Providing opportunities for learning and problem solving
• Improving productivity by helping employees to avoid mistakes that others have learned from

The cycle of knowledge from creation and organization through sharing and reuse is well documented in the literature. As shown in Figure 3.1, this cycle includes:

• Learning – as a result of accessing knowledge through information discovery and review or interactions with other people
• Using or applying knowledge
• Capturing knowledge by writing down lessons learned or creating documentation
• Managing codified information so that it can be discovered¹⁰

Knowledge management refers to activities related to:

• cultivating social and learning communities,
• providing knowledge codification and dissemination or transfer,
• creating a learning organization,
• mentoring less tenured employees, and
• creating expertise directories to help make connections across employees

Table 3.3 below includes examples of the subcategories within knowledge management, along with the associated activities and mission critical capabilities that are built through this strategy.

Table 3.3 Knowledge Management Strategies