Knowledge Mapping

Knowledge mapping is data gathering, survey, exploring, discovery, conversation, disagreement, gap analysis, education and synthesis. Knowledge Mapping is used to cover functions such as Knowledge Audit, a Network Survey and creating a map of the relationship of knowledge Assets to the core business process. In other words, it's an ongoing quest within an organization (including its supply and customer chain) to help discover the location, ownership, value and use of knowledge artifacts to learn the roles and expertise of people, to identify constraints to the flow of knowledge, and to highlight opportunities to leverage existing knowledge. This is an important practice since it aims to track the acquisition and loss of information and knowledge. The personal and group competencies and proficiencies within the organization is explored and it illustrates or "maps" how the information flow is happening through out the organization.

The key principles of knowledge mapping are:

• Understanding the knowledge is transient
• Explain the sanction, establish boundaries, and respect personal disclosures
• Recognize and locate knowledge in a wide variety of forms: tacit and explicit, formal and informal, codified and personalized, internal and external, short life cycle and permanent
• Locate knowledge in processes, relationships, policies, people, documents, conversations, links and context, suppliers, competitors and customers
• Be aware of organizational level and aggregation, cultural issues and reward systems, timeliness, sharing and value, legal process and protection (patents, trade secrets, trade marks, NDA's, etc)

Benefits of Knowledge Mapping:

1. Encourage re-use and prevent re-invention, saving search time and acquisition costs
2. Highlight islands of expertise and suggest ways to build bridges to increase knowledge sharing
3. Discover effective and emergent communities of practice where learning is happening
   Provide a baseline for measuring progress with KM projects
4. Reduce the burden on experts by helping staff to find critical information quickly
5. Improve customer response, decision making and problem solving by providing access to applicable information
6. Highlight opportunities for learning and leverage of knowledge
7. Provide an inventory and evaluation of intellectual and intangible assets
8. Research for designing a knowledge architecture or a corporate memory