- Using information effectively for limited purposes is obviously important for projects, but creating and using knowledge is the real end goal for organizations because knowledge management can be applied with and between projects, programs, portfolios, organizations, and across extended product life cycles. Effective knowledge management helps project professionals anticipate, understand, and respond to change, avoid making the same mistakes, create new solutions, make better decisions, and enable benefit realization. So where does knowledge management fit into an organization? Well, knowledge management efforts typically focus on organizational objectives, like enhancing performance, economical benefits, and sharing lessons learned, this type of thing. While knowledge management efforts sometimes coincide with organizational learning, they aren't really the same thing because knowledge management tends to focus on knowledge as a strategical asset, which can be used in a broader context of organizational learning. Let's go a little deeper into exactly how organizational knowledge works by taking a look at SECI diagram. This model focuses on socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization, thus the name. As you can see here, each of these areas is directly influenced by explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge refers to a collection of ideas and information that can be written down and easily communicated to others. Maybe something like the correct steps to follow in a given process. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, refers to information that's a little bit more difficult to communicate to others. For example, understanding coding structures. Beyond just explicit and tacit knowledge, there's a third type of knowledge called implicit knowledge. This isn't mentioned directly as part of the SECI model, but forms the basis for it. Implicit knowledge is what we already know, often subconsciously. An example might be basic skills we use all the time, like writing an email. Yes, this is a learned skill, but it's one that is basic and we tend to come into an organization with. Ultimately, knowledge is about more than just documentation. It's not managed directly but instead it's managed through the people who have it. Knowledge needs to be shared and built and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to knowledge management. And that's it for this video. Effective knowledge management will help individual projects succeed, but it's really about taking the whole organization forwards and improving all of the projects, programs, and portfolios an organization might have. In this video, we've touched on knowledge management in comparison to information management, knowledge management efforts and their relationship to organizational learning, and the SECI model.