PKMC Module II key terms

Personal, experience-based know-how that is hard to articulate or transfer in writing, such as judgment, craft skill, and intuition. It usually moves through demonstration, mentoring, and shared practice rather than documents.

Knowledge that has been articulated and recorded in a form others can access, such as procedures, manuals, databases, or reports. It can be stored, searched, and reused without the original knower present.

A framework describing knowledge conversion through four modes: socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization. It explains how tacit and explicit knowledge interact in cycles that create and expand organizational knowledge over time.

The process of converting knowledge into structured, storable, and reusable form, such as documents, taxonomies, or decision rules. It trades context richness for scalability and repeatable retrieval.

Systematically eliciting and recording knowledge from people, processes, or systems before it is lost. Techniques include interviews, observation, after-action reviews, and structured documentation of expert reasoning.

The practices and controls that keep critical knowledge available to the organization despite staff turnover, retirement, reorganization, or system change. It combines capture, transfer, and deliberate succession planning.

A structured debrief held soon after an activity to compare intended and actual outcomes and record lessons. It produces actionable findings while participants still recall details and can assign owners for follow-up.

Validated insights from past work that are documented and made accessible so future teams can avoid repeated mistakes or reuse successful approaches. Effective programs require review, ownership, and retrieval mechanisms.

A group of practitioners who share a domain of interest and learn from one another through ongoing interaction. Membership is voluntary, identity is practice-based, and value comes from informal exchange and relationship building.

The exchange of knowledge, experience, and insight between individuals or groups so that it can be applied by others. It depends on trust, incentives, culture, and accessible channels.

A shared belief that raising questions, admitting mistakes, or challenging assumptions will not bring humiliation or punishment. It strongly predicts willingness to share knowledge and report problems.

Deliberately withholding knowledge from others to preserve influence, status, or job security. It is a behavioral risk that incentives, culture, and transparent recognition practices can mitigate.

Conveying knowledge through narrative that carries context, emotion, and causal sequence. It is effective for transferring tacit experience and making lessons memorable in ways bullet points rarely achieve.

A developmental relationship in which an experienced person guides a less experienced one through advice, modeling, and shared work. It is a primary channel for transferring tacit knowledge and accelerating onboarding.

A method for mapping relationships among people, such as who seeks advice from whom, to reveal influence, bottlenecks, and isolated groups. It informs knowledge flow interventions and community design.

Structured data that describes other content, such as author, date, owner, subject, and sensitivity. Good metadata enables discovery, governance, retention enforcement, and reliable reuse across systems.

A hierarchical classification scheme that organizes concepts into parent-child relationships for consistent navigation and tagging. It supports browsing, faceted search, and reporting when maintained with clear governance.

A defined, governed set of preferred terms with rules for synonyms and variants, used to tag and retrieve content consistently. It reduces ambiguity and improves recall compared with free-text tagging alone.

A formal specification of concepts, properties, and relationships in a domain, often expressed in a machine-readable language. It supports inference and semantic interoperability beyond simple hierarchy.

A network of entities and typed relationships stored so machines can traverse and reason over them. It powers semantic search, recommendation, and integration across heterogeneous sources.

Retrieval that interprets meaning, intent, and relationships rather than matching literal strings alone. It can use embeddings, ontologies, or query expansion to surface conceptually relevant results.

A retrieval interface that lets users narrow results by multiple independent attributes such as date, topic, or owner. It depends on consistent metadata and works best alongside a controlled vocabulary.

The degree to which retrieved results satisfy a user's information need, shaped by ranking, matching, and context. It is improved through tuning, evaluation sets, and user feedback rather than assumed from technology alone.

Quantitative and qualitative measures used to assess knowledge activities and outcomes, such as reuse rates, contribution volume, answer times, and adoption. They should be tied to business goals to avoid activity-only reporting.

Demonstrating how knowledge capabilities produce measurable business outcomes such as faster resolution, reduced rework, or improved retention. It links usage evidence to financial or operational benefits with credible attribution.

A way of expressing the benefit gained from knowledge investments relative to their cost, often through proxies like time saved or avoided duplication. It requires documented baselines and defensible assumptions.

A structured assessment of what knowledge exists, where it resides, who uses it, and where gaps or risks lie. Findings typically inform strategy, taxonomy, and retention priorities.

Visualizing knowledge assets and flows, including who holds expertise, where content lives, and how it moves between roles or systems. It exposes dependencies, gaps, and single points of failure.

The likelihood and impact of losing critical knowledge through retirement, turnover, system failure, or poor documentation. It is assessed by criticality, uniqueness of expertise, and transferability.

The governed management of content from creation through active use, archiving, and defensible disposal. It aligns retention schedules, access controls, and storage practices with legal and operational requirements.

A documented rule set specifying how long records of each category must be kept and what happens afterward. It operationalizes legal, regulatory, and business requirements within content systems.

The decision rights, policies, roles, and processes that direct how knowledge is created, approved, accessed, and retired. It balances reuse and openness against quality, security, and compliance obligations.

Assigned accountability for the quality, meaning, and appropriate use of a knowledge asset or data domain. Stewards define standards and resolve issues but may not own the underlying system.

A record of the origin and transformation history of data or content as it moves across systems. It supports trust, impact analysis, audit, and troubleshooting of downstream reports and knowledge products.

An integrated technology platform that supports capturing, storing, organizing, retrieving, and sharing organizational knowledge. Its value depends as much on process and adoption as on feature depth.

A managed store of documents, records, and reusable assets with access controls and descriptive metadata. It is the backbone of codified knowledge but requires curation to avoid becoming an unsearchable archive.

A platform that indexes content across many internal systems and returns unified results under permission controls. Success depends on connector coverage, metadata quality, ranking tuning, and user trust.