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Zach Wahl, expert in knowledge and information management strategy, content strategy, and taxonomy design, presents a brief explanation of the importance of knowledge management and making connections.  Zach leads the Taxonomy Design Certification program at KM Institute, and is the CEO of Enterprise Knowledge, LLC.

After nearly twenty years of Knowledge Management Consulting, I’ve developed core themes to what I believe comprises good KM. EK’s definition of KM embodies many of these themes:

“Knowledge Management involves the people, culture, content, processes, and enabling technologies necessary to Capture, Manage, Share, and Find information.”

Launching their knowledge management initiatives, organizations often resemble oil extraction companies. They start to drill their knowledge wells and rub their hands in anticipation of the upcoming boost to their business. However, knowledge management often turns to be even harder than real oil extraction from the entrails of the earth. That is, even with such a sustainable resource as knowledge, only few companies succeed in making a good use of it.

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):