Information Mgt vs Knowledge Mgt

You call it Knowledge Management, I call it Information Management. Understanding the difference between these two terms.

There’s a new term in town called Information Management and it has me confused. It’s used by many Content Management Vendors to describe the capabilities of their products. But I thought Knowledge Management was the key for content management software. Can these two terms actually mean the same thing? Is the difference purely in their name alone?

To truly understand, I had to do a little digging (okay – googling). I wanted to find a solid definition for each term. I had to look no further then The Free Dictionary by Farlex, the following are the definitions I was seeking:

Information Management: The discipline that analyzes information as an organizational resource. It covers the definitions, uses, value and distribution of all data and information within an organization whether processed by computer or not. It evaluates the kinds of data/information an organization requires in order to function and progress effectively.

Knowledge Management: An umbrella term for making more efficient use of the human knowledge that exists within an organization. Knowledge management is the 21st century equivalent of information management. … The major focus of knowledge management is to identify and gather content from documents, reports and other sources and to be able to search that content for meaningful relationships.

So, information management is about defining information in an organization, how it’s used, where it’s distributed, and how business processes can be improved by it. In this case, information can be in the form of content or data. Knowledge Management is a specialized form of information management and deals with having the ability to use the knowledge in an organization (document, reports, etc) to improve business processes. They both are about improving business processes - by getting a better handle on information/knowledge.