What is the difference between information management and knowledge management?

Comment

Comment by Mary Diteko Sebusang on September 29, 2010 at 3:02am

Information management is mainly concerned with people managing information sources, that is, auditing them,acquiring and storing them for easy retrieval and dissemination of information and one has to make it a point that they are well preserved. whereas knowledge management involves people in creating, capturing, sharing and using knowledge in an organisation.

Comment by lesedi bimbo on September 22, 2010 at 10:04am

Lesego,Information management treats information as an object and its easier to identify information while on the other hand knowledge management treats knowledge as an object though it is not easy to identify since it is not codified.

Comment by Sanat K Chakraborty on September 14, 2010 at 3:40am

This debate - what is data, information, knowledge or what is Information management or knowledgment? or yet another, what do we mean when we say we are moving for information society to knowledge society? - is really interesting! My take on the issue is this (After reading various responses): Data is a stand alone input, when added value to an input or inputs it becomes information. Now here comes the tricky part: What do we understand from this information? How do we read this information? (We often see things what we want to see). As journalists we come out with different perspectives from a same piece of information from a source. Yes, one requires 'ability of reasoning', contextualizing to perform a 'task' (what is intended). So we use information the way we want it to 'create' something. That's , I guess knowledge. Or what !!!

Comment by Kian Abolfazlian on September 13, 2010 at 12:04pm

Hi Bonolo

I can see that you are looking for practical insight in how these two disciplines differ. From a practical point of view, both IM and KM are instances of what you may call “X-management”. This is: Systematic use of “X” in order to achieve the organizational goals.

The important issue is the “systematic use”, which is inherently connected to standardization. This is the belief that by standardizing, you will achieve the necessary conditions to get the quality control, being efficient as well as effective, scalability, performance enhancement etc, which will help you achieve the organizational goals. The systemization and standardization, of course, will look differently, depending of the subject of management (here: Information or the process of Knowing)

I am sure that you have your preferred definition of Information. But you can also look at Information as value-added data. The value-adding process is what (from an economic point of view) changes data (a resource) to Information (a capital). How you define the value, is something that comes from the context of use. It could be anything from “cleaning-up” the data, to making it related to some type of stakeholder in your context. In IM, the systematization and standardization are very closely related to this process of value-adding. There you can see where the traditional IM approaches come from and how they are evolved.

Now, the knowledge or more appropriately “the process of knowing” is different. Basically, the process of knowing is the ability to perform a specific task in a specific context. So the systematization and standardization will be focused on concepts of “ability”, “task”, “context”, and most importantly the process itself. The first 3 are very closely related to what you may call Knowledge Capture. There you use heavily all the IM techniques and methodologies. But the process part is trickier. You can apply systematization/standardization to the process (you find a lot Office Automation platforms and methodologies for this), which can give you (a partial) Knowledge Transfer and Knowledge Retention abilities, but they fall short when you get to the Knowledge Creation.

This is because the process of knowing (actually more than usual) is based on the communication process. Here communication is more closely related to interaction (among stakeholders). Therefore you have the more organizational centric approaches, which use CoPs (specially powered by new ICT technologies, Web 2.0 etc). Here you would get what you call Client-oriented approaches.

I hope that it helps.

Comment by nondlela ndabezith on September 10, 2010 at 1:46pm

Information has emphasis on human involvement in auditing, acquiring, storing, retrieving and disseminating information while knowlwdge management has emphasis on human involvement in capturing, creating, sharing, learning and contextualising information.

Comment by Bonolo Tsiripane on September 10, 2010 at 7:54am

Thanks for all your response.

Comment by Md Santo on September 9, 2010 at 9:11am

Dear Bonolo ,

Knowledge as the continuation of Data as well as Information evolution, playing important paramount role in the form of KM. My point of view based on assumption that Knowledge as human knowing tool evolved as emergent property inside human being as complex system since the beginning of life ( see my K-base http://delicious.com/mobeeknowledge/di-kwmodel ) and acting as human consciousness. Considering Knowledge is consciousness, we treat Knowledge always as subject. On the other hand, Data as well as Information which are exist outside human being, should be treated as object.

Therefore Knowledge Management (KM) essentially is not management technique but behaving more as an access mechanisms that can be used across any management tool type such as Information Management, Content Management, Total Quality Management, Learning Organization, Benchmarking, Process Classification Framework, Business Process Reengineering, Balanced Scorecard, Business Intelligence including Social Media platforms etc. wherein each with their specific functions to be orchestrated under KM’s consciousness. So, here we put KM in incredibly broad meaning as subject with higher level than any other management tool type which is treated only as object ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/28696847/How-to-re-postulating-the-paradi ... and http://mobeeknowledge.ning.com/forum/topics/why-knowledge-managemen... )

To conclude, I’d like to suggest not to put the term “Knowledge” against or vs “Information” considering the very different of each nature as I’ve mentioned above. Visit also my link http://mobeeknowledge.ning.com/forum/topics/why-knowledge-managemen... (“Why KM has so many rivalries within?”).

Best,
Md Santo

Comment by Knowledge Management for Development on September 7, 2010 at 3:42pm

Hi Bonolo,

You might want to take a look at a summary of responses re. that very discussion topic here on the wiki:

http://wiki.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/Difference_between_IM_and_KM

Best,
Lucie