Developing Corporate Taxonomies for Knowledge Auditability : A Framework for Good Practices

The organisation of knowledge for exploitation and re-use in the modern enterprise is often a most perplexing challenge. The entire knowledge management life-cycle (for example - create, capture, organize, store, search, and transfer) is impacted by the organisation of intellectual capital into a corporate taxonomy or at the least a knowledge map (often incorrectly used interchangeably). Determining the extent to which such an objective is achieved is the focus of what is known as a knowledge audit. In this practice-oriented article, the authors review the fundamentals of creating a taxonomy, the use of meta-data in a necessary process known as classification and the role of expertise locators where the knowledge is not explicit but resides within experts in the form of tacit knowledge. The authors conclude with a framework for developing a corporate taxonomy and how such a project may be executed. The conceptual contribution of this article is the postulation that corporate taxonomies that are designed to facilitate knowledge audits lead to greater organizational impact.