KM Competencies

I am on a posting spree today! Someone asked me to share my thoughts on the typical competencies of a KM professional and I thought it would be good to put them up here as well. In the past, I've had opportunities to prepare job descriptions and roles & responsibilities documents for KM roles. This one is not going to be as exhaustive. Anyway, those documents were very organization-specific and delved into nitty gritties that are not essential for this post.

Here are my preliminary thoughts on the characteristics or qualities preferred in a KMer.

I think the fundamental dependency of such a definition is on the KM vision and objectives of the organization. For example, an organization that is targeting innovation through KM needs people who are slightly different from an organization that aims to achieve learning/productivity improvements through KM. Having said that, KM, however, needs people with a versatile or eclectic background and profile/competency.

1. People skills: Networking and Organizational behaviour skills to start with. Also important would be insights into how people learn, collaborate and share/reuse/apply knowledge
2. Technology skills: Requirements gathering, products evaluation, design and testing (More skills required in the case of a KM developer)
3. Process skills: I think this is important but neglected. Understanding of business and project management processes in order to lead to improvements from the perspective of knowledge capture, sharing and utilization

I think understanding the big picture with re. to a business scenario (structure, relationships, objectives, challenges and future developments) is very critical as well.

What do you think?