I was reminded last week at a conference of the Gesellschaft für Wissensmanagement e.V. Knowledge Management in the 21st Centurythat learning is also defined as change in behavior.
To quote Wikipedia:
"From the perspective of learning psychology, learning is understood as a process of relatively stable change in behavior, thinking, or feeling based on experience or newly gained insights and understanding processed perception of the environment or awareness of one's own impulses. " - Wikipedia
Take an example from product development: it is quite possible that those involved in product development speak a different language, use different terms, than is necessary for a registration or safety assessment of the products.
Knowledge management can now mean documenting these different terms, whether in a simple table, in a database, as master data, or even in a semantic graph database that also supports different usage scenarios, entire phrases and different jurisdictions.
But what really matters is that this data is used, that the right terms, phrases, paragraphs are used in an application. As reliably, as effectively, as cheaply as possible.
Without this change in behavior, managed knowledge is worthless, indeed it has a negative value: the resources that go into building and managing that knowledge represent a cost that is not matched by a benefit.
So what is knowledge management?