What Is Collaborative Knowledge Management Or CKM?

In our world, we have gone from the industry age to the computer age and many researchers believe that we are heading for the information age and knowledge age but there are many people that say we are already there. With technology constantly growing, we are reaching a point where the machines do the majority of thinking and the humans work on the collaborative knowledge management of this thinking.

There is no real definition of collaborative knowledge management or CKM. But, you can think of CKM as a process where organizations generate value from their knowledge based and intellectual assets. When you generate value from these assets, you have to share them with your employees, departments, and even the competition in other companies in order to devise the best practices from that knowledge.

We can also define collaborative knowledge management as any tool that supports the team members and that share information that can contribute to the knowledge base system. Basically what this boils down to is everyone needs everyone in order to make any kind of profit in this world and this is all considered collaborative knowledge management.

For example, a company has researched a new product line that they would like to create. They are a company of ideas but in order to make money off of this product, they would need to include the people who have the materials to create the product, they would have to include the designers who would take the materials and actually create the product, and they would have to include the marketing people that would market and sell the product. This is not even mentioning the lawyers and business people that you have to include in order to get a patent.

This is an example of collaborative knowledge management. This company has taken their knowledge and shared it with several other different entities in order to give that knowledge a value for the group as a whole because everyone would generate a profit. This type of management happens every day but in today technology, business people are trying to harness the actual idea around the collaborative knowledge management and installing it into a software product that would make it more concrete and workable. In other words, they are trying to put a value on this idea that puts values on every other idea of knowledge. If there is a way to make money, it does not matter how many layers you make from an idea just as long as it has potential of value.