Knowledge Management and Knowledge Security - a Conceptual Comparison

Taking care of knowledge is important for every company nowadays. Knowledge is acknowledged as an important asset along with traditional resources such as money and raw materials. The discipline of knowledge management seeks answers to questions such as how to make the best use of knowledge within an organization. As well as every asset, also knowledge needs to be protected so that it is properly secured from outsiders and other threats. Knowledge security addresses the protection of knowledge in organizations. However in the real world, the knowledge management efforts and the knowledge security efforts have little to do with each other, even though both aim to nurture the same assets. The people that plan and implement knowledge management strategies are not necessarily the same people who plan for security. Thus literature on the topic of these concepts is written for different audiences with different interests. This paper explores the literature for knowledge management and knowledge security management. Both management books and scientific articles are reviewed. Common goals and common incentives are searched for, as well as grounding differences in approaches. The approach of this paper is theoretical. The paper comprises conceptual examination of two concepts; knowledge management and knowledge security. Especially knowledge security is a relatively new concept, so study of relating concepts from the field of information security is needed. The paper also takes a deeper look into the concept of knowledge and its role in both of the concepts under study. The aim of the paper is to find out the common factors and main differences of knowledge management and knowledge security. Common factors of the concepts include for example a close connection to strategic planning and the aim to codify important knowledge. Implications for the practitioners are presented and discussed.