What is Collaborative Knowledge Management (CKM)

This article will describe the background, basic infrastructure, and future trends of collaborative knowledge management (CKM) and enterprise knowledge management (KM) systems. CKM is about capturing the information that is in people’s heads and sharing it in a collaborative manner (e.g., an open, application-independent framework that allows all to have access to it) across the enterprise. In order to take advantage of the knowledge that exists in organizations, an authoring process must be undertaken that categorizes and places important information into a shared resource (often referred to as a “knowledge repository”) that can be assessed by all relevant stakeholders. Collaboration should be across departments, various types of employees, and different types of projects within the enterprise. Some of the important topic areas that will be discussed in this article are the focus on the benefits of CKM and enterprise KM systems and the recent attempts to define the return-on-investment (ROI) of sharing knowledge across organizations.