Knowledge Management Glossary

absorptive capacity - the individual and/or organizational openness to change and innovation, and the capability or preparedness for being able to integrate it.

appropriability - the extent to which something can be imitated. Things are said to have "strong" appropriability if they are difficult to reproduce by another organization. The converse is "weak" appropriability. A related concept is that of "sticky/slippery", i.e., sticky knowledge is an integral part of a regime such that it cannot be extracted in a meaningful whole.

benchmarking - the practice of identifying qualitative and quantitative metrics against which the success of an organization can be measured, often in comparison to competitors and industry standards. Identifying best practices or lessons learned are common by-products of benchmarking.

best practices- methods of performing a process or sub-process that have been identified inside or outside of the organization and which are validated, codified, diffused, and shared with others to encourage reciprocity and knowledge sharing.

bias for action- a term popularized by Tom Peters in "Search for Excellence" that describes the propensity for large, innovative companies such as Hewlett-Packard, 3M, Johnson & Johnson to act first and analyze/contemplate later. "Just do it" is a popular, synonymous phrase.

boundary objects- objects that are shared by more than one party, but are not perceived in the same way by all parties. Because they are shared, they can form the basis for negotiation, community, dialog, hence changes in perception, etc. For example, data on fish in a specific watershed might be used by public fisheries to monitor the health of the population, or by activists to promote a political agenda.

business process re-engineering (BPR) - a methodology that aims to reorganize work in order to increase productivity and/or decrease costs. Also known as BPR, it is often a companion or by-product of knowledge management initiatives.

collaboration - a key tenet of KM, given that knowledge sharing--among colleagues and customers within and outside of the organization--is an effective means of transferring "know-how" or tacit knowledge between individuals and therefore critical to competitive advantage.

collaborative filtering - a voluntary practice and method, most prevalent on the Internet, of pooling and ranking informed opinions on any particular topic. A relatively well-known example is PHOAKS (People Helping One Another Know Stuff) where anyone can post opinions of web resources in Usenet Netnews which PHOAKS reads, classifies, abstracts and tallies automatically.

communities of practice (COPs) - a self-organized, deliberate collaboration of people who share common practices, interests or aims and want to advance their knowledge. When the community proves useful to its members over time, they may formalize their status by adopting a group name and a regular system of interchange.

competitive advantage- a term popularized by Michael Porter of Harvard Business School and author of the business classic "Competitive Strategy", it is the unique blend of activities, assets, relationships, history, and market conditions that an organization exploits in order to differentiate itself from its competitors, and thus create value.

competitive intelligence (CI)- according to the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, CI is a "process of monitoring the competitive environment to enable senior managers in companies of all sizes to make informed decisions about everything from marketing, R&D, and investing tactics to long-term business strategies." The field is populated by practitioners who are former employees of powerful government/military intelligence agencies such as the FBI and the CIA. However, CI should not be confused with the illegal and unethical practices that characterize industrial espionage. One example of how CI might be carried out is to guess what R&D a rival firm is engaged in by noting the topics their in-house scientists are presenting papers on at conferences.

corporate memory - the practices of organizations, embodied in its members, which influence its current behavior--good or bad. Technologies that enhance corporate memory include (but are not limited to) datawarehouses, document management systems, and expert systems. A complementary concept is "learning to forget", where entities strive to retire traditional, but no longer optimal, competitive strategies.

core competencies - the key functions that an organization does best and uses to create sustainable value and wealth. These things are typically very complex orchestrations of activities spanning much of the organization, such as Wal-Mart's just-in-time inventory competency. When used to describe employees, the word "core" is left off and refers to their capacity--comprised of education, skills, experience, energy and attitudes--to act in a wide variety of situations.

corporate culture -the values of an organization, frequently expressed as behaviors that are incented and rewarded. For example, some investment banks in the early 80's promoted individual initiative (versus team work) through practices such as putting several people into one position: the person who out-performed his/her peers got to keep that position--until the next round of candidates was hired to challenge the survivor.

corporate instinct - Based on the collective explicit and tacit knowledge of an organization and its core competencies, it is an organization's innate intelligence that, along with analytical reasoning, an aspect of decision making.

data mining - a type of application with built-in proprietary algorithms that sort, rank, and perform calculations on a specified and often large data set, producing visualizations that reveal patterns which may not have been evident from mere listings or summaries.

data warehouses - a separate, centralized, integrated (i.e., cleaned up, merged, and redesigned) repository of information optimized for data retrieval and reporting. Usually, data warehouses are read-only analytical tools, and as such contain data that is historical, stable, and adjusted for errors that may have occurred in the transaction systems (i.e., day-to-day business applications).

decision support systems - business applications that usually contain summaries of large amounts of data, filtered and synthesized particularly to support strategic decision-making.

deskilling - a mostly unfavorable situation whereby organizations--and even individuals--lose critical competencies, corporate memory, or knowledge as a result of attrition, downsizing, automation, lack of learning, or bad management.

document management systems (DMS) - a family of applications which facilitate the management of compound documents, including storage/archiving, cataloging/indexing, search and retrieval, analysis, workflow, routing, aggregation, diffusion, and distribution. Examples of DMS can be found on our products page.

dynamic capabilities - a theory of creating competitive advantage, especially in times of rapid technological change, through identification of new opportunities followed by efficient coordination of internal technical, organizational, and managerial processes for rapid and innovative product delivery.

early adopter - a minority of clients/users that are the first to perceive value in new products, services, or ideas, begin to use them, and become adept with them before the majority of eventual clients/users does. On a curve of total eventual users, the early adopter is succeeded by the fast follower, who is succeeded by the late bloomer.

enabling technologies - any software, hardware, or operative methodology that permits the interaction of separate components. For example, enterprise messaging or middleware, connect distributed, diverse, and sometimes previously incompatible computers and software.

expert systems - applications of artificial intelligence techniques to perform decision-making tasks based on a programmed set of rules and logic within specific subject areas. Examples include insurance underwriting or investing which frequently employ case-based reasoning or semantic analysis.

experiential learning - see "situated learning"

explicit knowledge- knowledge that has been expressed in words and numbers and shared in the form of data, scientific formulae, specifications, manuals, etc. It is easy to distribute and it is "slippery". Explicit knowledge, which is also known as "codified" knowledge, is the opposite of tacit knowledge.

gatekeeper - individuals, units, or even objects that act as accepted, authoritative information channels employed in the information seeking process. Gatekeepers frequently also contribute to bridging terminological cultures and value systems. One example of this is using the telephone yellow pages (the gatekeeper) as a source of mechanics to work on a broken appliance.

information architecture - an aspect of information systems development, commonly referred to within the context of website design, which focuses on organizing information and developing a navigational structure. Common tasks of the "information architect" would include site map design and content management. The information architect's focus on content management complements the roles of graphic designers and usability experts who are usually also part of a website development team.

information audit - a study of the fluency and efficiency of flows of information, i.e., blockages, duplicative data collection, failure to coordinate and/or combine, etc.

innovation - a primary focus of KM given that innovation, or the ability to craft often radically new solutions/products, is often viewed as one of the sole sustaining competitive advantages of the modern firm.

intellectual capital - the sum of everything the people of an organization know which can be converted into value or formalized, captured, and leveraged to produce a higher-valued asset. This is actually one of a family of terms--such as social and process capital--used to identify types of knowledge assets.

intellectual property - knowledge, almost exclusively explicit, which is recognized and protected under the US laws for copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. It is further characterized by being amenable to valuation which permit pricing and contractual agreements such as licensing.

knowledge - justified belief that increases an entity's capacity for effective action (Nonaka); the highest degree of the speculative faculties, which consists in the perception of the truth of affirmative or negative propositions (Locke).

knowledge brokers - in the knowledge markets paradigm popularized by Laurence Prusak, the party that facilitates connections between buyers and sellers. Brokers are guides, and as such contribute to other peoples' success. Other terms for this role include trusted intermediary and "infomediary".

knowledge buyers - in the knowledge markets paradigm popularized by Laurence Prusak, the party requesting "commodities" such as insights, judgments, and understanding.

knowledge creation - as defined by Ikujiro Nonaka, it is a spiraling process of interactions between explicit and tacit knowledge where ideas form in the minds of individuals; interaction with others is usually a critical step in developing the ideas. Nonaka's model of this process is composed of 4 steps: socialization (tacit to tacit); externalization (tacit to explicit); combination (explicit to explicit); internalization (explicit to tacit).

knowledge management - the strategies and processes of identifying, capturing, and leveraging knowledge to enhance competitiveness (adapted from the American Productivity & Quality Center.)

knowledge maps - guides or inventories of an organization's internal and external information and knowledge sources. The sources of information include files, web pages (in intranets and extranets), document management systems, recordings of best practices, databases, data warehouses and data marts. Sources of knowledge include subject experts, business rules, workflow charts, procedure manuals, "cookbooks", and diagrams.

knowledge markets - a concept developed by Laurence Prusak which sees knowledge in firms behaving like a traditional, tangible commodity which can be exchanged, bought, bartered, found, and generated. The main price mechanism of the knowledge market is reciprocity, the expectation that one will receive valuable knowledge in return for giving it. Additionally, the knowledge may have either present or future value for parties to the transaction.

knowledge repositories - collections of knowledge "nuggets", the contents of which are characterized by having the authority of a best practice (which in turn implies a review for quality and validity) and having been organized according to some scheme to facilitate visualization, manipulation, and navigation. Examples of repositories include: threaded discussion databases that hold "lessons learned" and which must be created with--at a minimum--a date, author and subject classification; product marketing materials and methods, which represent a distillation of product knowledge; competitive intelligence; and people(!).

knowledge transfer - the action and flow by which largely tacit knowledge is transmitted among people.

knowledge worker - a term coined by Peter Drucker to describe participants in an economy where information and its manipulation are the commodity and the activity. Contrast this with the industrial age worker who was primarily required to produce a tangible object. Examples of knowledge workers include--but are not limited to--marketing analysts, engineers, product developers, resource planners, researchers, and legal counselors.

legitimate peripheral participation - a theory that recognizes that learners can contribute even as novices while also influencing their "teachers" and changing the body of knowledge they are acquiring. A synonymous concept is that of the apprentice/master relationship and arrangement.

metadata - "data about data," it provides information about resources, such as title, author, location, and date of creation of the information being described, like a book or a website, for example.

OLAP - stands for "online analytical processing", a type of application that attempts to facilitate multidimensional (i.e., data that has been aggregated into various categories or "dimensions") analysis. That is, OLAP should help a user synthesize enterprise information through comparative, personalized viewing as well as through analysis of historical and projected data.

situated learning - a synonym for apprenticeship that emphasizes the contextual, real-life learning and mentoring aspects of knowledge acquisition which in turn requires absorbing tacit and explicit knowledge.

subject matter expert - an individual with expertise in a certain subject area; within the context of KM, this person may be seen as an authority and act as the gatekeeper of knowledge for their particular subject area.

tacit knowledge - knowledge that is not made explicit because it is highly personal, not easily visible or expressible, and usually requires joint, shared activities in order to transmit it. Examples of tacit knowledge include subjective insights, intuitions, and hunches. Also known as informal knowledge, it is the opposite of explicit knowledge.