Knowledge management system

Knowledge Management System (KM System) refers to a (generally IT based) system for managing knowledge in organizations for supporting creation, capture, storage and dissemination of information. It can comprise a part (neither necessary nor sufficient) of a Knowledge Management initiative.

The idea of a KM system is to enable employees to have ready access to the organization's documented base of facts, sources of information, and solutions. For example a typical claim justifying the creation of a KM system might run something like this: an engineer could know the metallurgical composition of an alloy that reduces sound in gear systems. Sharing this information organization wide can lead to more effective engine design and it could also lead to ideas for new or improved equipment.

A KM system could be any of the following:

KMS systems deal with information (although Knowledge Management as a discipline may extend beyond the information centric aspect of any system) so they are a class of information system and may build on, or utilize other information sources. Distinguishing features of a KMS can include:

A KMS offers integrated services to deploy KM instruments for networks of participants, i.e. active knowledge workers, in knowledge-intensive business processes along the entire knowledge life cycle. KMS can be used for a wide range of cooperative, collaborative, adhocracy and hierarchy communities, virtual organizations, societies and other virtual networks, to manage media contents; activities, interactions and work-flows purposes; projects; works, networks, departments, privileges, roles, participants and other active users in order to extract and generate new knowledge and to enhance, leverage and transfer in new outcomes of knowledge providing new services using new formats and interfaces and different communication channels.

The term KMS can be associated to Open Source Software, and Open Standards, Open Protocols and Open Knowledge licenses, initiatives and policies.

Benefits of KM Systems

Some of the advantages claimed for KM systems are:

External links

Knowledge@work community

References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

Akscyn, Robert M., Donald L. McCracken and Elise A. Yoder (1988). "KMS: A distributed hypermedia system for managing knowledge in organizations". Communications of the ACM 31 (7): 820-835.
Benbya, H (2008). Knowledge Management Systems Implementation: Lessons from the Silicon Valley. Oxford, Chandos Publishing.
Langton, N & Robbins, S. (2006). Organizational Behaviour (Fourth Canadian Edition). Toronto, Ontario: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Maier, R (2007): Knowledge Management Systems: Information And Communication Technologies for Knowledge Management. 3rd edition, Berlin: Springer.
Rhetorical Structure Theory (assumed from the reference of RST Theory above)http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W01/W01-1605.pdf
Rosner, D.., Grote, B., Hartman, K, Hofling, B, Guericke, O. (1998) From natural language documents to sharable product knowledge: a knowledge engineering approach. in Borghoff Uwe M., and Pareschi, Remo (Eds.). Information technology for knowledge management. Springer Verlag, pp 35-51.
The RST site at http://www.sfu.ca/rst/ run by Bill Mann