What is the relationship between knowledge management and risk management?

A recent LinkedIn post¹ asks these important questions:

Have you considered that Knowledge Management is Risk Management?

Or do you see it as a nice to have – simply capturing information as resources to be accessed in the future?

If we look at the research knowledge, we find that knowledge management (KM) can certainly be risk management, particularly if we look at KM from a knowledge risks perspective.

Professors Susanne Durst and Malgorzata Zieba’s groundbreaking work on this is presented in their 2018 foundation paper² summarised in the RealKM Magazine article³ “Looking at knowledge management from a knowledge risks perspective.” Figure 1 below shows the knowledge risks map from the paper.

One area of knowledge risks that I have addressed in my own work is the operational risks associated with program and project management. This field faces a number of the operational risks⁴ shown in Figure 1, including continuity risks and knowledge transfer risk. The short-term nature of programs and projects means that staff are often temporary, so may not have existing knowledge sharing relationships when they begin, and take their knowledge with them when they move to their next contract.

Approaches to addressing these operational risks are explored in the RealKM Magazine series “KM in project-based & temporary organisations,” in particular:

• Part 6⁵ – Using a risk causation model to capture and transfer knowledge.
• Part 7⁶ – The risk library approach and how it relates to the risk causation model.

Another area of knowledge risks is the human risks of knowledge withholding, hiding, and hoarding, for which there is a growing body of research, as presented in the RealKM Magazine series on this topic.

Professor Durst highlights the need to address knowledge risks in the paper⁷ “A plea for responsible and inclusive knowledge management at the world level.” Hanna M. Koskinen explores core principles for responsible KM (rKM) in her thesis “The Emerging Concept of Responsible Knowledge Management (rKM): Identifying and Formulating the Core Principles of rKM” which we’re presenting in RealKM Magazine⁸.

Header image source: Wokandapix on Pixabay.

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