Performance support can serve both our information and knowledge needs. It distills information into usable chunks. Rather than sending someone to wade through piles of documentation, an EPSS support tool can send them to concise procedural steps for the task they are to perform. The aim of KM is to create learning organizations that provide equal access to corporate memory. A learning organization denotes a structure of practices, systems, and culture that promotes sharing experiences and lessons learned to encourage quality performance and continuous improvement.
Corporate memory includes all the information, data, and know-how that a company possesses.
This memory is often inadequately captured as explicit knowledge, and it ignores undocumented tacit knowledge. KM attempts to open the vaults of tacit knowledge stored in people's heads and add it to the active corporate memory. By doing so, higher quality resources are available for training purposes and performance support. To understand the implications of explicit and tacit knowledge, consider the analogy of a computer system. The system represents explicit knowledge.