About Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is the science whose ultimate purpose is to come up with smart ways to collect, to gather, to explicit and to spread Knowledge among a community of people. Companies have started to include KM in their strategy to be more competitive, more reactive and more efficient since KM is supposed to increase the benefit of a masterized Knowledge.

We commonly make the confusion between Information and Knowledge.

"Information" is probably too restrictive to talk about Knowledge. Actually we must consider that:

Information concerns only explicit facts, rough data such as figures, news, or other content which are immediately understandable by everyone. Managing information means basically managing content.

"Knowledge" term encompasses actually several things, which can be distinguished into 2 big concepts :

• Explicit knowledge, which is already understandable and tangible; (information belong to this category)
• Tacit knowledge, which deals with knowledge of unexplicit forms, e.g. knowledge remaining in people's brain, know-how, secrets, etc... which stem out from people's personal experience.