50 things to do with knowledge; an analysis of verbs in KM definitions

I took an online collection of 65 KM definitions (now no longer available I am afraid) and did a quick word count of the active verbs related to the management of knowledge

Here are the results for each verb

Use                                23 appearances

Create                            17

Share                             15

Leverage                       11

Apply                            11

Improve                         11

Access                           10

Manage                           9

Capture                           7

Store                               6

Integrate                         6

Organize                         5

Generate                         5

Analyze                          5

Gather                             4

Transfer                          4

Retrieve                          4

Enhance                          4

Develop                          4

Verbs appearing 3 times – Facilitate, Optimize, Increase, review, Put, Promote

Verbs appearing 2 times – Distribute, Disseminate, Retain, Save, Acquire, Get, Exploit, Accumulate, Collect, Connect

Verbs appearing once – Guard, Grow, Expand, Cultivate, Elicit, Diffuse, Maintain, Understand, Represent, Spark, Comprehend, Formalize

This analysis tells us that we, as a collective industry,recognise a very wide set of activities releated to knowledge. More than 50 verbs are used, so there are 50 things that you can do with knowledge, that are important enough to appear in someone’s definition.

However there are some synonyms here – acquire, get, gather, collect, capture, elicit, are all to some extent synonyms.  We can therefore look at synonym clusters

Retrieve, apply, use, access, review, exploit, understand, comprehend

Transfer, distribute, share, diffuse, connect, promote, disseminate

Gather, capture, acquire, get, elicit, collect

Create, generate

Store, guard, maintain, accumulate, retain, put, save, organize

So now we have 6 verb clusters. If you want to use these to create a generic definition, you could say 

Simple, boring, but possibly good enough.

I still prefer the current ISO definition however.