As knowledge management practitioners, we often get questions about what we mean by “knowledge management.” And we know from experience that KM in practice is context specific. Organizations have different knowledge needs and different ways of approaching the knowledge needs.

Our work with organizations to discover and clarify their knowledge strategies shows that they often face challenges with determining which organizational knowledge is most critical.

Knowledge maps are an important tool to help in the process of identifying, capturing, and categorizing your most critical knowledge. This is an important process that can help bring your knowledge management strategy to life, by ensuring that those involved reach a shared understanding of what constitutes the organizational critical knowledge. This knowledge will form the heart of your knowledge strategy.

By engaging in this type of process of identifying, naming, and categorizing what counts as knowledge you / your team is defining the boundaries of what is in and out in your knowledge strategy. This is how you tackle information overload- not all data and information that exist in an organization will be part of your knowledge management practice.

The actual tool used to do a mapping process can vary and there are many good examples out there. We often learn from and utilize resources by the APQC community of knowledge management practitioners. This APQC brief covers the basics: including the definition, benefits, and types of mapping, as well as concrete steps on doing mapping work in an organization.

If you are in the foundation or nonprofit space and you think the process map example is not exactly your cup of tea, we think you should think again. Don’t be turned off by the customer language; at its heart a process map is often a useful type of knowledge map that helps you identify when you are (un)knowingly reinventing the wheel in your work. Then you can spend your energy using that knowledge for good.