From Skills and Competencies to Outcome‐based Collaborative Work: Tracking a Decade's Development of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Models

Abstract

In the area of knowledge management, existing and past research has tended to focus on the enterprise level. The topic of personal knowledge management (PKM) has only seen growth recently although PKM is not new, as our ancestors sought ways to learn better and to improve their knowledge. However, there are very little empirical researches, or significant conceptual development has been done with PKM, and there is lacking paper to evaluate the previous PKM literatures. This paper aims to provide a critical review of the published literature related to PKM and the PKM models. From the previous literatures, it is clear that PKM is playing an important role at individual, organization, and social level. PKM has evolved from mere individual activities to something that are more outcome/impact oriented; from information handling skills to personal competencies, sense making, and self‐reflection; from individual focused to a community and social collaborative focused. A new PKM model is developed based on the recent research done by the authors. There are four core components in this new PKM model, namely personal information management, personal knowledge internalization, personal wisdom creation, and interpersonal knowledge transferring. At the end of this paper, the Web 2.0‐based PKM tools was evaluated and important roles were identified to facilitate the practicing of PKM. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.