CM vs KM - What’s the difference?

We see it nearly every day.  People confuse Content Management (CM) with Knowledge Management (KM). Both deal with creating, managing and publishing content - so it’s easy for the lines to blur. Dig a little deeper, though, and you will discover that content and knowledge are quite different and require distinct workflow processes and solutions to manage effectively.

Content management is generally a one-way process where content is pushed to an audience from some centralized group of authors or SMEs, who are often removed from the people who actually consume the content (i.e. employees, partners, customers), and disconnected from the business situations that prompt the demand for that content in the first place. There is very little collaboration and limited opportunities for others to share information.

Knowledge management extends content management by enabling collaboration and the harvesting of knowledge content, thoughts, ideas, solutions, tips and tricks from multiple sources - both internal and external to the organization, often at the point of demand (i.e. when an agent is resolving an open case; or from a discussion in a support forum).  With knowledge management the people who use the content and information in the system have the opportunity to provide feedback on what they need and make contributions to the system that others can leverage when find themselves in similar business situations. This approach distributes the content creation and maintanence burden, and vastly improves the quality and value of the system for those who are using it.  

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