Knowledge management definitions.

Blogs – How we integrate blogs into people’s work lives and into the enterprise.

Classification – How we organize content through metadata once we’ve collected it.

Cleansing – Scrubbing undesirable information from documents before they are reused.

Collaboration – How to get people to work together efficiently on projects.

Communication – Ways in which messages pass from person to person and within groups.

Communities – All types of communities, whether they’re communities of practice, communities of interest, virtual or not.

Competitive intelligence – Basically, finding out what your competitors are doing.

Content management – How we manage all the electronic stuff that an enterprise produces.

Controlled vocabularies – See vocabularies.

Customer relationship management – How the people and processes in place to deal with customer relationships work (and how they can be improved).

Data mining – Finding useful patterns in heaps of data that can aid in decision-making.

Documentation – Clearly documenting processes for others.

Document management – Essentially, managing documents. It’s sometimes confusing as to where content, records and document management begin and end.

Expertise directories – Collections that describe what individuals know about a particular subject and to locate those individuals.

Feeds – Using RSS or other feed standards to deliver information to a reader.

Information architecture – How we structure information to achieve a goal, whether that’s findability, ease of access or another goal.

Information management – How we manage information from a broad strategic context down to individual documents and data.

Knowledge collection – How to collect the knowledge that people share.

Knowledge mapping – Also sometimes called a knowledge audit. It’s basically just figuring out where knowledge comes from and what its flow through the organization is.

Knowledge sharing – How we get people to share what they know.

Knowledge reuse – How we reuse what we or someone else already knows in a new, innovative way.

Metadata – The information about information that makes the latter findable.

Metrics – Tracking who access and uses what in order to better utilize and organize resources.

Narrative and storytelling – Using stories and narrative to convey lessons and experiences that improve business performance.

Network analysis – Determining not only what your current social network looks like, but also identifying the strong points and gaps that exist.

Outsourcing – Determining if there are less expensive and more effective locations or people to conduct knowledge work.

Portable information delivery – Delivering information, news or data to portable devices.

Portals – The aggregate place where we collect all the information that may be relevant to employees of an organization.

Search – This is really the technology that makes a search engine work, which also relates to findability and metadata.

Semantic web – The movement towards a natural language web where we can freely exchange data and knowledge using common easily-understood standards.

Succession planning – How we deal with people leaving the organization, and the knowledge that goes with them.

Taxonomy – A specific often-hierarchical way of organizing information.

Training – Making sure that people understand the processes and technologies that we implement.

Vocabularies – Determining a consistent, agreed-upon language for how we describe the business our organization does.

Wikis – How we use collaborative editing to solve business problems.


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KnowledgeCog is a place to collect links, information and resources to provide anyone interested in knowledge management with the tools necessary to stay informed.