What is the difference between information management and knowledge management

Why is knowledge management important? Employees also move on, taking with them company knowledge. Effective knowledge management reduces operational costs and improves productivity by: Spending less time recreating existing knowledge Getting the information you need sooner Making fewer mistakes Making informed decisions Standardize processes.

You may also be interested in reading: Should knowledge management software be an investment priority? The process of effective Information Management Information management enables organisations and their teams to work more efficiently and effectively when they can rely on accurate and timely information and data. The process of information management encompasses a cycle of different activities: Collection — collecting information can be in many different forms such as written, oral, electronic, audio or video.

Only collect the information that is needed and can be trusted. Storage — storing information is important for analysis, legislative requirements, historical trends, etc. Make sure the right people have access to the information, as well as version control, export permissions, back-ups, etc. Curation — the process of gathering and organizing information relevant to a certain topic with the intention to add value.

Dissemination — what information needs to be distributed or shared and with who, in what format, how often, under what circumstances, etc.

Archiving — based on company policy and judgement, information needs to be archived at a certain time. Make sure to have an effective classification system in place that anticipates future uses.

Destruction — destructing or deleting, Corporate Information and data may have an expiry data. It can be important for now but may not have any value in the future. Think of privacy laws that only allows you to store information for a specific period of time. The process of effective Knowledge Management The definition of knowledge management provided by Gartner Group is as follows: "Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets.

The high-level discipline and process for knowledge management is based on: Capture — create, collect, classify Distribute — retrieve, share, manage Use it — consume, reuse, enhance Key differences between Information Management and Knowledge Management Let's start with the key differences between information and knowledge: Information is organized data obtained from various sources.

Knowledge is understanding of the subject acquired from experience or education. Information comes from data put together in a meaningful way.

Whereas information combined with experience and intuition, results in knowledge. Information can be codified and it is easily transferrable using technology.

Knowledge is both codified and uncodified but the the most valuable knowledge is often uncodified. The transfer of knowledge is therefore more difficult because it is unarticulated and requires experience or learning. Information can be reproduced easily and at a lower cost. The reproduction of knowledge is more difficult since it is reliant on tacit knowledge.

Information is mostly about know-what, i. Knowledge is Information alone is not sufficient to make predictions about someone or something. On the contrary, knowledge has the ability to predict or make inferences.

Information Management vs Knowledge Management. Information and IM: Focus on data and information Deal with unstructured and structured facts and figures. Benefit greatly from technology, since the information being conveyed is already codified and in an easily transferrable form. Focus on organizing, analyzing, and retrieving - again due to the codified nature of the information. Is largely about know-what, i. Is easy to copy - due to its codified and easily transferrable nature.

Knowledge and KM: Focus on knowledge, understanding, and wisdom Deal with both codified and uncodified knowledge. Uncodified knowledge - the most valuable type of knowledge - is found in the minds of practitioners and is unarticulated, context-based, and experience-based.

Yet the transfer of knowledge is not as easy as it sounds. There are two types of knowledge: explicit and tacit or implicit.

Explicit knowledge is easily documented because this is the type of knowledge that is easily explained. An example of explicit knowledge is explaining how to operate a system. So much knowledge is stuck in the human mind.