Knowledge Management
Knowledge management is the strategic process of capturing, organizing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge to improve decision-making, innovation, and operational efficiency.
Read summarized version with
What is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management (KM) refers to how organizations capture, organize, share, and put their collective knowledge to work. It's the strategies, tools, and habits that help businesses get real value from what their people know, whether that's hard-won expertise, documented processes, research findings, or customer insights. The point? Making sure valuable information actually reaches the people who need it, when they need it.
Think of knowledge management as turning individual know-how into something the whole organization can use. Instead of letting critical information stay trapped in someone's head or buried in random folders, good knowledge management brings everything together in a way that preserves what matters and helps everyone learn. The business case is pretty clear: organizations that get this right save employees close to 4 hours a week that would otherwise be spent hunting for information. On the flip side, poor knowledge sharing costs Fortune 500 companies around $31.5 billion every year.
Knowledge management isn't just about the technology you use to store and find information. It's equally about building a documentation culture where people actually want to document what they know, share it with colleagues, and learn from each other.
Key Characteristics of Knowledge Management
- Knowledge Capture: Converting what people know from experience (tacit knowledge) into something others can use (explicit knowledge). This happens through interviews, documentation, shadowing, and observation.
- Organized Storage: Central repositories with good categorization, tagging, and search so people can actually find what they're looking for without asking around.
- Knowledge Sharing: The tools and cultural norms that get people to contribute their expertise and learn from colleagues across different teams and departments.
- Continuous Improvement: Regular reviews and updates to keep everything current and useful as the business changes and grows.
Types of Knowledge in Knowledge Management
Explicit Knowledge
Explicit knowledge is the stuff you can write down and hand to someone else. Manuals, SOPs, FAQ documents, knowledge base articles, training decks, company wikis. If it's documented and shareable, it's explicit. This type makes up roughly 10-20% of what an organization actually knows.
Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge is trickier. It's personal, built through years of experience, and often hard to put into words. The intuition a salesperson develops for reading a prospect. The judgment an engineer applies when troubleshooting a weird edge case. A customer service script is explicit knowledge, but knowing when a customer is about to escalate just from their tone? That's tacit. Something like 80-90% of organizational knowledge falls into this category, which is why capturing it matters so much for business continuity.
Implicit Knowledge
Implicit knowledge sits somewhere in between. It's the stuff that hasn't been written down but could be if someone took the time. The informal habits, unwritten rules, and day-to-day practices that shape how work actually gets done. Surfacing this kind of knowledge often reveals gaps and opportunities to document processes that people have just been figuring out on their own.
Knowledge Management Examples
Example 1: Employee Onboarding
Picture a tech company that uses a knowledge management system to bring new hires up to speed. All the training materials, company policies, IT setup instructions, and role-specific docs live in one searchable place. New employees can find video walkthroughs, process guides, and answers to common questions without constantly interrupting their teammates. This kind of setup can cut onboarding time in half while keeping training consistent across departments. It also means the organization doesn't lose everything when experienced people move on.
Example 2: Customer Support Documentation
A SaaS company maintains an internal knowledge base for support agents with troubleshooting guides, product docs, resolution playbooks, and escalation procedures. When a customer calls with a problem, agents can quickly search for solutions instead of starting from scratch every time. Resolution times drop, quality stays consistent, and the team can track which articles get the most traffic to spot knowledge gaps and keep documentation up to date.
Knowledge Management vs Knowledge Base
People often use these terms interchangeably, but they're not quite the same thing.
| Aspect | Knowledge Management | Knowledge Base |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Strategic framework for managing all organizational knowledge | Centralized repository for storing documented information |
| Scope | Encompasses culture, processes, systems, and practices | Specific tool or system for information storage and retrieval |
| When to use | Developing organizational strategy for knowledge sharing | Implementing a specific solution to store and access documentation |
A knowledge base is one piece of a larger knowledge management strategy. But real knowledge management also includes how you build the culture, set governance policies, and keep improving over time.
How Glitter AI Helps with Knowledge Management
Glitter AI makes knowledge management easier by letting you capture tacit knowledge through screen recording. Instead of spending hours writing documentation, teams record their processes as they work and automatically generate visual step-by-step guides. This approach picks up details that often get lost in written docs, like mouse movements, navigation flows, and the contextual cues that make procedures easier to follow.
The biggest barrier to knowledge management has always been the time it takes to document things properly. Glitter AI cuts that from hours to minutes. The result is a searchable knowledge repository that prevents knowledge loss when people leave, speeds up onboarding, and keeps critical processes consistent across the organization.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is knowledge management?
Knowledge management is the systematic process of capturing, organizing, sharing, and effectively using organizational knowledge to improve decision-making, innovation, and operational efficiency. It transforms individual expertise into accessible organizational assets.
What are the three types of knowledge in knowledge management?
The three types are explicit knowledge (documented and easily shared information like manuals), tacit knowledge (personal experience-based expertise that's hard to articulate), and implicit knowledge (undocumented but codifiable practices and informal processes).
Why is knowledge management important for organizations?
Knowledge management prevents critical knowledge loss when employees leave, reduces time spent searching for information, improves decision-making through better access to insights, and can save employees up to 4 hours per week while boosting productivity by 10-40%.
What is an example of knowledge management?
A common example is an employee onboarding system that centralizes training materials, policies, and role-specific documentation in a searchable knowledge base, reducing onboarding time by 50% while ensuring consistent training across departments.
What is the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge?
Explicit knowledge is documented and easily shared (like SOPs and manuals), while tacit knowledge is personal expertise gained through experience that's difficult to articulate (like intuition or knowing how to read customer emotions).
Turn any process into a step-by-step guide