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470 Glossary

Knowledge researcher Individual who is responsible for searching, retrieving, and delivering
knowledge that is in explicit or codifi ed form.

Knowledge repository A place to store and retrieve explicit knowledge. A low-tech knowledge
repository could be a set of fi le folders. A high-tech knowledge repository might be based on a
database platform.
Knowledge steward Individual whose responsibility is to convert tacit knowledge to explicit
knowledge that can be more easily codifi ed. Person who interviews a project team and then
captures and summarizes the learnings from that session.
Knowledge taxonomy A scheme that partitions a body of knowledge and defi nes the relation-
ships among the pieces; used for classifying and better understanding the body of knowledge.
Knowledge worker Term coined by Peter Drucker to refer to professionals who are relatively
well educated and who create, modify, and/or synthesize knowledge as a fundamental part of
their jobs. Someone whose primary job focus is the accumulation, processing, or analysis of data
and information, as opposed to physical goods.
Landmark A high-level ethical guideline often built upon tenets of an organization ’ s culture
and often conveyed through stories.

Learning organization An organization that possesses the practices, systems, and culture that
actively promotes sharing of experiences and lessons learned to encourage quality performance
and continuous improvement.

Legitimate peripheral participation Formerly referred to as “ lurking, ” this refers to a quite dif-
ferent kind of learning theory, situated learning, which is primarily social rather than psychologi-
cal. It is legitimate because all parties accept the position of “ unqualifi ed ” people as potential
members of the community of practice. It is peripheral because they hang around on the edge
of the important stuff, do the peripheral jobs, and gradually get entrusted with more important
ones. It is participation because the person is learning.
Lesson learned Knowledge that results from a postmortem or after-the-fact analysis of a project,
a new technique, or the application of new knowledge; lessons learned are the “ opposites ” of
best practices — they are caveats, hard-earned experiences of unsuccessful endeavors that should
be disseminated widely throughout an organization in order to prevent the same mistakes from
being made again or to ensure that valuable innovations are not lost. A work practice or experi-
ence that is captured and shared to avoid a recurrence.
Likert scale A scale developed by Rensis Likert for the purpose of measuring a person ’ s degree
of agreement or disagreement with a set of carefully constructed statements.
Maturity The state of being fully developed. Attainment of a desired goal when growth and
progress toward that goal has been successfully completed.
Media richness The ability of a given medium or channel to carry content with respect to
metadata, speed of feedback, diversity of cues, and ability to convey emotion.