This year (2026), I am participating in the KM Mentoring Program. The program is is a collaboration between the KM4Dev and SIKM Leaders communities.
I’ve learned a lot from my peers and unofficial mentors over the years so I figured it was time to give back .
But first…
What is Knowledge Management?
A search on Google states that
“Knowledge management is the systematic process of capturing, organizing, storing, and sharing an organization’s information and expertise. Its main goal is to ensure that employees and customers can easily find and use the right knowledge at the right time to improve efficiency and decision-making. [1, 2, 3, 4].” and sources including APQC are linked.
See:
The simplest explanation is ensuring that “the right people have access to the right information at the right time”
But even this statement is not so simple, because that information may not be so easily accessible. Where is it stored? Is it written down? Is it in people’s heads and only used (found) when those people are asked the right question?
So what does a Knowledge Management worker do?
Well depending on your organisation’s size and the KM roles setup within in that organisation, you could be responsible for some or all of the aspects of building the knowledge management program such as:
- Defining, organising, storing and sharing organisational knowledge, working to improve efficiency, foster a collaborative culture and establish standard knowledge management systems.
- Creating a knowledge management strategy: Tailoring a specific plan to suit the organisation.
- Determining the main purpose of the knowledge base: Identifying the purpose, such as real-time knowledge sharing vs. occasional training.
- Developing an implementation plan: Breaking the task down into specific steps, adding a timeline and creating a plan for onboarding.
- Choosing knowledge base type: Picking a format, such as FAQs, PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, web portals, Wikis, help centres, in-browser extensions or on-premises databases.
Skills or Tasks might include:
- Content Management
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Collaboration with SMEs
- Gap Analysis
- Technical Writing
- Training
- Project Management
- Change Management
- Understanding software lifecycles and systems
- Continuous Improvement
From Stan Garfield’s KM102 – 2016
Or from his 100 KM specialities
100 Knowledge Management Specialties (For examples of each, see KM 102)
- Sharing, culture, organizational design, and change management
- Innovation, invention, creativity, and idea generation
- Reuse, proven practices, lessons learned, and knowledge retention
- Collaboration and communities
- Learning, competency development, and training
- Goals, measurements, incentives, gamification, recognition, and rewards
- Social networks, organizational networks, value networks, and network analysis
- Expertise location and personal profiles
- Communications
- Facilitation and knowledge transfer
- User support and Knowledge-Centered Service
- Content management, document management, and records management
- Analytics, text analytics, visualization, metrics, and reporting
- Project management, process management, Agile development, workflow, planning, decision making, and checklist
- Knowledge audit, knowledge mapping, knowledge modeling, peer assist/retrospect, After Action Review, sensemaking, and ritual dissent
- Appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, and Most Significant Change
- Storytelling, narrative, anecdote circles, BarCamp/unconference, and World Café
- Information architecture, usability, user interface, and user experience
- Search, findability, taxonomy, ontology, metadata, tagging, and semantic web
- Portals, intranets, and websites
- Big data, databases, repositories, business intelligence, data warehouses, and data lakes
- Competitive intelligence, customer intelligence, market intelligence, and research
- Digital workplace, social business, and social media tools
- Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and neural networks
- Wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, and prediction markets
As you can see there are a lot of activities and opportunities if you are participating in a KM program.
Next: Developing a KM Strategy