Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a concept that has grown out of a combination of knowledge management (KM) and personal information management (PIM) and cognitive human abilities.

This is focused on helping an individual be more effective and to perform better. Although we are focusing on an individual and his growth through gaining knowledge, the goal is to enable the individual to operate better in groups and in corporations as well. This is as opposed to the traditional view of KM, which appears to be more centered on enabling the corporation to be more effective by "recording" and making available what its people know.

A core focus of PKM is 'personal inquiry', a quest to find, connect, learn and explore. It is the increasing need to grow and learn for inidividuals and their responsibility to explore and self acquire, which has led to the Personal Knowledge Management. There is also a need to have processes and tools which will help the individuals to evalaute their present knowledge in given scenarios, ananlyzr their gaps and then try to see ways and meeans to bridge this gap. In todays world, we see lots of blogging, k-logs, and other measn to capture thoughts, ideas, opinions, suggestions, thoughts which helps in encouraging cognitive diversity, promoting free exchanges away from a centralized knowledge repository, which may be a reference location.

The four components of PKM are:

• 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