Knowledge Management (KM) is a very broad field. It intersects with a lot of different management practices, and means different things to different people, in different sectors. So, when you're researching KM (or even just trying to explain it), you'll find many different interpretations and practices that emphasize different things. That's of course very confusing. To avoid this confusion, you should know there are actually three kinds of knowledge management. Understanding their differences, and what each of them is for, is a huge help in selecting those practices that are most useful to the challenge you're dealing with. 

Process Knowledge Management

The first form of KM is process knowledge management. This form has been pioneered by (and is still most common in) high-expertise sectors where the cost of failure or mistakes is very high. For example: petrochemical industry, military, aerospace, engineering, medical, and finance. Organisations in these sectors invest in process KM as a means to minimize risks and costs.

Process KM is designed to support standardization and collaboration, and reduce the costs of processes and projects. It is also intended to help identify high-value innovation opportunities. This means the implementation of process KM often interacts with the implementation of process management frameworks such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile. However, while these frameworks focus on providing a proven base for organisations to adopt, process KM focuses on leveraging the experience of people in the organisation for continuous improvement. In other words, traditional process management is top-down, while process KM is bottom-up. There is synergy in having both though – process KM doesn’t tell you how to run a certain process, only how to embed continuous learning and improvement of that process.

On a day-to-day basis, process knowledge managers focus on connecting stakeholders, facilitating the capture and implementation of lessons learned, and ensuring that process information is accurate, easily found, and implemented in any relevant training. We’ll discuss the implementation of process KM in greater detail later.

Knowledge Service Management

The second form of KM is knowledge service management, though it is more commonly known as Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS), for the framework of the same name. KCS is most applicable in those organisations whose purpose it is to provide information to their customers (internal or external), or where this is a big part of the day-to-day work. This can include customer service organisations, IT, HR, legal firms, consultancy companies, and academia. The goal of this form of KM is to reduce the dependency on experts for information, so that these experts are freed for higher-value work, projects, and changes. It also serves to unblock those who needed the information in the first place. KCS provides practices and tools to turn the relevant knowledge into accurate, findable, and actionable information – and ensure the information remains accurate, findable, and actionable.

One of the defining principles of KCS is “demand-driven”. Following KCS, a team will not create information they anticipate will be useful, but only create or modify information based on actual demand. This means the organisation’s information system or knowledge base is not cluttered with information that might be useful, but only contains information that has proven to be actually useful. For this reason, KCS is often implemented alongside ITIL and other service management practices. For example, ServiceNow fully supports the implementation of KCS, and allows registered issues and information requests to be directly linked to knowledge articles. This allows leaders to identify common questions and issues, and see which information could be provided to customers to reduce their dependency on the service team for assistance.

Research Knowledge Management

The third form of KM is research knowledge management, which grew out of traditional library management. It focuses on providing structure to the gathering and compiling of information to support research efforts. This can include case studies, legal precedents, market data, technical specifications, and other information. It also means this form of KM mainly applies to organisations that provide highly specialized expertise, such as legal firms, sector-specific consultancy companies, government, non-profits, and universities. It can also apply to communities of practice and other professional networks. In practice, research KM is all about improving the findability and relevance of information, and finding interesting connections, patterns, and trends in that information. In this way, research KM can be considered a parallel for data management, focusing on qualitative information rather than quantitative information.

These then are the three forms of KM. Each form offers different things, but it’s important to remember they overlap in their implementation, and can often provide highly valuable synergies. For example, Research KM can help create standardized information that feeds KCS, while Process KM can help optimize the research process itself.

Learning & Development vs Knowledge Management

Before we conclude this article, we should discuss the relation between Knowledge Management and Learning & Development (L&D). L&D may have a different name in your organisation, but is usually a part of human resource management. It focuses on competence management and the development of employees. Compared to KM, L&D could be considered a “top-down” approach; it translates the competence needs of different roles into defined training paths. By comparison, KM is more “bottom-up”. With training you have a defined outcome, while the results of KM usually emerge more organically through day-to-day work and experience.

That said, KM and L&D both have the goal of preserving and improving the capabilities of the organisation – they just focus on different aspects of that challenge, and actually synergize very well. KM feeds the training content based on actual experience in the specific context of the organisation, which makes the training much more relevant. L&D builds the baseline for competences that KM continues to build on.