The Knowledge Management Landscape: reflections of the journey to nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. Walking, talking and working with no-one, someone, anyone and everyone

Authors

  • Andrew Herd

Keywords:

knowledge management, mapping, landscape, terminologies, projects, collaboration

Abstract

This community note describes the process of the Knowledge Management (KM) Landscape, an open, collaborative project to map the landscape of knowledge management which took place over period 24 January-11 July 2025. The path walked was collectively explored and determined, with each co-creative session realising the next incremental step towards capturing more of the KM Landscape in a terms list. From the start we acknowledged its limitations: that it may fail as a concept, that it could never be complete in the envisioned timeframe and that it was inherently exclusive, whilst having the exact opposite, inclusive, intent. The KM Landscape project was by its nature, impulsive, non-conforming and unconventional in trying to embrace voices from inside, at the perimeter and outside of knowledge management. It included seasoned and new voices.

Author Biography

Andrew Herd

Andrew Herd has 25 years of experience in the space domain, with the past decade as Senior Engineer for Corporate Knowledge Management at the European Space Agency (ESA). During his tenure, he led over 50 lesson capture and learning initiatives, significantly contributing to ESA’s Lessons Learned program. He has also managed knowledge management for the largest Directorate at ESA, which includes approximately 1,000 space experts. His leadership was crucial in addressing knowledge loss due to a wave of retirements, organizing more than 200 “Legacy” events to identify knowledge gaps and develop effective capture strategies. A notable achievement of Andrew’s is his role in creating and managing the development of innovative Lessons Learned web and mobile applications. These tools incorporate Knowledge Graph and Chatbot AI technologies, improving the efficiency and quality of knowledge capture and retrieval for users. Andrew is a recognised thought leader, having authored over 30 publications, including academic papers, case studies, and books. He is the lead author of 20 of these works and has produced a podcast mini-series on knowledge management in the space sector. Additionally, he has chaired international panels on lessons learned, further establishing his expertise in the field.

References

Collison, C. J., Corney, P. J., & Eng, P. L. (2019). The KM cookbook: Stories and strategies for organisations exploring Knowledge Management Standard ISO30401. Facet Publishing.

Milton, N. & Lambe, P. (2016). The Knowledge Manager's Handbook. Kogan Page.

Syed, M. (2019). Rebel ideas: The power of diverse thinking. Hachette UK.

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Published

2026-06-08

Issue

Online first

Section

Community Notes

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Herd

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The copyright of the articles published in this journal remains the property of the authors. For liability reasons, the title belongs to the Foundation for the Support of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. This journal is currently an open access journal as it has a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of "open access", we support the rights of users to "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles." However, some of the content (2009-2012) is only available on the Taylor and Francis website. Within the next few months, this issue too will become available on the OJS. [1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess