Five main components of knowledge management

Cirsten Paine of Virchow Krause explains what KM is:
1) Operational knowledge/organizational information:
This is the kind of information that you would have about a company, how you create your product, how you get the product out the door. Also, workflow management and document management.
2) Collaborative flow. It’s the folklore of the organization, the history, and the company culture. “If somebody leaves, those experiences walk out the door if we haven’t found a way to capture them,” Paine says.
“It’s the culture, the mission, the mantras of the organization – all the informal stuff. If you spent a day here at Virchow Krause, I’ll bet you’d hear people saying the phrase ‘clients come first’ 20 times. It’s all the stuff that isn’t in your computer system, and that you can’t put in a report, but it’s key to your business.” Also, it has to do with where people sit and how they interact.
3) Reference information: Think of a librarian. A lot of companies have a difficult time managing this, which is really the most basic piece. This is all the information that is out there and available about your
industry. It’s like a virtual library of relevant information. Your goal is to capture it as best you can.
4) Customer information. This is all the marketing information,
the stuff about your customer that you need to know.
5) Meta knowledge: Knowing what you have, where it is, and how
it is stored. Imagine some sort of omniscient, god-like librarian, who knows where everything is and how to get at it. That’s meta knowledge. (Most organizations don’t have this).