The two disciplines are constantly merged in job titles and almost never merged successfully in practice, because they answer different questions and are judged by opposite tests. One is measured by what you can produce when asked; the other is measured by what somebody found in twenty seconds. Confusing them produces a base full of records and a records program full of advice.
The test each one is judged by
Information management succeeds when a record that had to be kept can be produced, complete and dated, at the moment it is demanded. Knowledge management succeeds when a person with a question finds the answer before they give up and ask somebody. A single system built for the first is slow and complete; built for the second it is fast and current. Those are genuinely different designs.
What overlaps, and it is smaller than people think
The overlap is the small set of documents that are both a record and a reference: the current version of an approved procedure, the signed policy, the schedule of retention periods. Those documents live in the records system and are linked from the base, never copied into it, because a copy is the version that goes stale and gets read.
Why merging them degrades both
Apply records discipline to the whole base and writing an article becomes a formal act, so people stop writing them. Apply knowledge-base informality to records and the retention schedule becomes advisory, which is the failure that gets noticed externally. Each discipline's virtue is the other's defect, and the honest answer is two systems with one deliberate seam.
Who should own each
Records belongs with whoever answers for retention and disposition, which in a regulated company is usually compliance or legal. The base belongs with the function whose people read it, which is usually support or operations. The seam between them is a short list of linked documents and a rule about which direction the link points.
Questions people ask about information management and knowledge management
Is a knowledge base article a record?
Usually not, and the exception matters: an article that evidences what the company told people to do at a given time can become one. That is a decision for whoever owns retention, made once for a class of article rather than page by page.
Can one product do both?
Several claim to. The question to ask is whether disposition is enforceable per document and whether an article can be edited without ceremony. Products that do the first well rarely do the second, and a base nobody edits is worse than no base.
Which should a company build first?
Records, if anything external depends on it. Otherwise the base, because it pays back faster and its absence is felt daily rather than annually.
Where does data management fit?
Alongside both and underneath neither. Data management governs structured data in systems; these two govern documents and answers. Treating all three as one program is how companies end up with a strategy document and no base.