Community of Practice: Communities that form within an organization where people assume roles based on their abilities and skills instead of titles and hierarchical stature. Also referred to as Community of Interest.

Context Sensitivity: The ability of a Knowledge Management system to provide insight that takes into consideration the contextual nature of a user’s request based on history, associations, and subject matter experience.

Corporate Instinct: A company’s collective "sixth sense". Corporate Instinct enables a company to respond instantaneously to market opportunities, customer needs, and competitive maneuvers.

Corporate Memory: An unquestioned tacit or explicit understanding of an organization’s people, process, or products. Corporations, like individuals, remember the past, including long-standing processes and procedures, along with corporate traditions and values. Memory is strategically important, but it can also become a serious liability if it inhibits an organization from adjusting quickly to its changing environment.

Document Management: A software system based on an underlying database, in which unstructured objects (i.e. documents) are indexed and tracked.

Explicit Knowledge: Knowledge that is easily codified and conveyed to others. See Tacit Knowledge.

Externalization: The transfer of knowledge from the minds of its holders to an external repository in the most efficient way possible. Externalization tools help build Knowledge Maps. They capture and organize incoming bodies of Explicit Knowledge and create clusters of bodies of knowledge.

Intellectual Capital: Intellectual Capital can be segmented into three sub-categories: Human Capital, Structural Capital, Customer Capital. Although acknowledged as valuable in most organizations, these assets are not measured and accounted for in an organization’s financial statements other than as goodwill. Many believe these assets form the basis for most equity market valuations of an organization.

Internalization: The transfer of Explicit Knowledge from an external repository (temporary or permanent) to an individual, in the most useful and efficient way possible. There are two aspects to Internalization: extraction and filtering. One of four key Knowledge Management functions. See Knowledge Mapping, Externalization, Internalization, and Cognition.

Knowledge Base: Typically used to describe any collection of information which also includes contextual or experiential references to other Metadata.

Knowledge Ecology: The component of Knowledge Management that focuses on human factors: namely, the study of personal work habits, values, and organizational culture.

Learning Organization: An organization with the necessary practices, culture, and systems to promote the continuous sharing of experience and lessons learned.

Tacit Knowledge: Experiential know-how based on clues, hunches, instinct, and personal insights; distinct from formal, Explicit Knowledge.

Velocity of Innovation: The rate at which an organization is able to conceive of and introduce new product to market.