Personal Knowledge Management - Definitions

Personal knowledge management (PKM) refers to a collection of processes that an individual needs to carry out in order to gather, classify, store, search, and retrieve knowledge in his/her daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007). One of its focus is about how individual workers apply knowledge processes to support their day-to-day work activities (Wright 2005)

Personal knowledge management (PKM) integrates personal information management (PIM), focused on individual skills, with knowledge management (KM). Many people undertaking this task have taken an organizational perspective. From this perspective, understanding of the field has developed in light of expanding knowledge about human cognitive capabilities and the permeability of organizational boundaries. The other approach for PKM is metacognitive - it compares various modalities within human cognition as to their competence and efficacy (Sheridan, 2008).

Connections to Organizations and Groups

PKM has recently been linked to social bookmarking, blogging or knowledge logs (K-logs). The idea is individuals use their blogs to capture ideas, opinions or thoughts and this 'voicing' will encourage cognitive diversity, promote free exchanges away from a centralized policed knowledge repository that is additional to ordinary work.Some organizations are now introducing PKM 'systems' with some or all of four components:

  • Just-in-time Canvassing - templates and e-mail canvassing lists that enable people looking for experts or expertise to identify and connect with the appropriate people quickly and effectively

  • Knowledge Harvesting - software tools that automatically collect appropriate knowledge residing on subject matter experts' hard drives rather than waiting for it to be contributed to central repositories
  • Personal Content Management - taxonomy processes and desktop search tools that enable employees to organize, subscribe to, publish and find information that resides on their own desktops
  • Personal Productivity Improvement - knowledge fairs and one-on-one training sessions to help each employee make more effective personal use of the knowledge, learning and technology resources available to them, in the context of their own work