What is Knowledge Management?

"I don't know what the facts are but somebody's certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know." [Donald Rumsfeld; Former US Secretary of Defence]

Knowledge is the inherent wisdom that people have, coupled with the facts that people can gather from the internal and external environment.

• facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education;
• the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject;
• what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information;
• awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

The common thread through all of these definitions is that knowledge is gained through the capture, understanding and interpretation of facts, as gathered and assessed through human intervention.

John Poindexter explained the role of Knowledge Management in his presentation to the International Risk Assessment & Horizon Scanning (IRAHS Symposium, Singapore) in March 2007. “Sense-making & path-finding” outlines the Poindexter model :

So the primary source of knowledge (interpretation of facts) is people. And is often the case, particularly in services, the knowledge on how to deliver these services resides within people.
Knowledge management looks to harness this “people knowledge” so that it can be accessed and shared across the organisation

And to paraphrase Donald once again “…because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."