Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning are a strategy, processes, and enabling tools used in an organization to identify, create, distribute, and enable implementation of better procedures because the organization is able to take advantage of staff experience. The experiences represent knowledge, embodied in individual staff and embedded in organizations as procedures, processes or practices.

The motivations that lead organizations to undertake a Knowledge Management or an Organizational Learning effort include the desire to reduce or eliminate mistakes in the enterprise, facilitate and manage innovation, leverage the expertise of people across the organization, retain expertise of individuals leaving the organization, or more efficiently solve difficult problems. This use of knowledge management helps the business reduce expenses.

Increasingly knowledge management efforts are also used for marketing, business development, and customer service. In this way KM and OL efforts help a business increase revenue and should be seen as a resource with unlimited potential.

Knowledge sharing remains a challenging issue as barriers include issues around making time for knowledge work, trust and culture in the organization, and simplicity of support technologies.

Knowledge Management efforts can overlap with Organizational Learning in the classic and precise definitions of each discipline. In practice, organizations that are undertaking initiatives in these areas may be using techniques in both disciplines depending on their needs and objectives. In the next pages of this website, I will share my corporate experiences in Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning. I will discuss how we distinguish between the two disciplines, when it may be important to make that distinction, and I will provide a summary of the processes and techniques I have evaluated and/or used since I began working in this area in earnest around 2006.

Several references to scholarly articles are made in this website. A full reference to each citation is listed in the summary and resources page.