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Chapter 11 Managing Knowledge 455

Enterprise-wide knowledge management systems deal with all three types of
knowledge.

ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Businesses today need to organize and manage both structured and semistruc-
tured knowledge assets. Structured knowledge is explicit knowledge that
exists in formal documents, as well as in formal rules that organizations derive
by observing experts and their decision-making behaviors. But, according to
experts, at least 80 percent of an organization’s business content is semistruc-
tured or unstructured—information in folders, messages, memos, proposals,
e-mails, graphics, electronic slide presentations, and even videos created in
different formats and stored in many locations.
Enterprise content management systems help organizations manage
both types of information. They have capabilities for knowledge capture, stor-
age, retrieval, distribution, and preservation to help firms improve their busi-
ness processes and decisions. Such systems include corporate repositories of
documents, reports, presentations, and best practices, as well as capabilities
for collecting and organizing semistructured knowledge such as e-mail
(see Figure 11.3). Major enterprise content management systems also enable
users to access external sources of information, such as news feeds and
research, and to communicate via e-mail, chat/instant messaging, discussion
groups, and videoconferencing. They are starting to incorporate blogs, wikis,
and other enterprise social networking tools. Open Text Corporation, EMC
(Documentum), IBM, and Oracle Corporation are leading vendors of enterprise
content management software.
Barrick Gold, headquartered in Toronto, is the world’s leading gold producer,
and it uses Open Text tools for enterprise content management and for
supporting communities of practice. The company has 26 operating mines and
20,000 employees worldwide, who were creating and storing information in
many different locations. Barrick needed a way to centralize this organizational

FIGURE 11.3 AN ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

An enterprise content management system has capabilities for classifying, organizing, and managing
structured and semistructured knowledge and making it available throughout the enterprise.

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