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Do you assume people will adopt your new knowledge management initiative, or is adoption something you are actively investing in? Resistance can be the death knell for a KM project, and can lead to technology being left unused, processes being ignored, and knowledge being hoarded.

Taxonomy management typically follows a Library and Information Science paradigm. The taxonomist is a keeper of knowledge, who is responsible for updating and managing the “Source of Truth.” Each version of the taxonomy is published and subsequently distributed to separate systems to help perform specific functions.  Such change control processes are effective for ensuring stability and quality, but they can be a costly use of time and resources.

Taxonomy is not as daunting as it seems. In this blog series, one of EK’s taxonomy experts, Ben White, provides 4 practical steps to designing and validating a user-centric taxonomy.

Step #4: Measure the Findability of Your Content

Search, which is central to enterprise-wide knowledge transfer, is simple in theory; a user enters a set of key terms in a search engine and the search engine retrieves records that match the key terms. In reality, the architecture of a search engine is nothing more than:

Taxonomy is not as daunting as it seems. In this blog series, one of EK’s taxonomy experts, Ben White, provides 4 practical steps to designing and validating a user-centric taxonomy.

Taxonomy is not as daunting as it seems. In this blog series, one of EK’s taxonomy experts, Ben White, provides 4 practical steps to designing and validating a user-centric taxonomy.

Step #2: Make Sure Your Facets Are Consistent

Taxonomy is not as daunting as it seems. In this blog series, one of EK’s taxonomy experts, Ben White, provides 4 practical steps to designing and validating a user-centric taxonomy.

In the following post we will be looking at the future of knowledge management (KM), specifically we will explore together the key tenets of what the field has to hold and how technology will change the role of the KM  practitioner.

Historical aspects of KM (some history nuggets that should be considered before reading on).  

The following timeline showcases the three generations of Knowledge Management (click image to view larger version on original post):

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." – Charles Darwin

When presented with a question or challenge, some humans are diffident about their knowledge and timid to take action.  Others bullishly push forward with confidence in what they think they know.  The underlying issue in both cases is the same:  many people suffer from false illusions of inferiority or superiority and are unable to evaluate themselves.

Over the years I have felt extremely frustrated with the so-called knowledge repositories, such as SharePoint, and the many other solutions for collaboration that exist around an intranet. Many years ago I joined an engineering consultancy firm in London called Fulcrum (which a few years later merged into Mott MacDonald). That was back in 2008 and we were around 150 employees, with small offices in Edinburgh, Madrid and Hong Kong. Those were the days were sustainable building design was going strong.

Following up from my last blog post: Too busy to get help? Take time to learn!

I hear from my Customers (our 20k+ Enterprise Services employees worldwide) almost every day, how hard it is “to find the stuff I need”, or “to find the good stuff”, out of a list of search results that sometimes spans tens of thousands of returns. And I totally get that. I feel the same way very often, whether I am looking for stuff internally, or trying to book flights for my next vacation.