Knowledge Management
The discipline of capturing, organizing, sharing, and reusing an organization's collective knowledge — both documented information and the tacit expertise in people's heads — so it stays accessible and useful over time.
Knowledge management (KM) is the practice of helping an organization create, capture, organize, share, and reuse what it knows so that valuable expertise is not lost and good decisions can be repeated. It deals with two kinds of knowledge: explicit knowledge that is already written down (reports, procedures, lessons learned) and tacit knowledge that lives in people’s experience and judgment, which KM tries to surface through mentoring, communities of practice, and well-curated knowledge bases.
KM matters for recordkeeping because the two are complementary but not identical. Records management asks what an organization is obligated to keep and for how long, governed by a retention schedule and disposition authority; KM asks what is useful to keep findable and reusable to do the work better. A record of a closed project may be retained for legal reasons even when its KM value has faded; conversely, a heavily reused how-to guide may carry little evidential value as a record. Strong metadata, taxonomy, and a clear file plan serve both goals at once, which is why mature programs align them rather than running them in isolation.