ABSTRACT
Identifying critical knowledge and where it can be found is crucial to enabling the effective flow of that knowledge to enhance timely decision making. This chapter provides examples of how to map organization's knowledge and assess critical knowledge gaps in order to improve access, flow, and reuse of critical knowledge by the people who need it, when they need it. Knowledge mapping is one useful knowledge management (KM) practice that is been successfully used in many industries to identify and catalog critical knowledge. A knowledge map can help generate the lay of the land for a functional group, a community of practice/network, or process (business or technical). Identification of knowledge via knowledge mapping can also help identify its relative importance as not all knowledge is equally important. Mapping functional knowledge is typically a reactive activity as the function in question already exists and has already generated and stored knowledge in some manner.
