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456 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age

expertise, make it easier to access critical company information, and ensure that
best practices are documented and shared. Barrick’s Knowledge Center is a cen-
tral repository for documents about policies, procedures, standards, guidelines,
new ideas, and best practices, and has capabilities to identify the latest version of
each document. Administrators know who is accessing the site and which docu-
ments they are using. The content management system includes social network-
ing tools, such as wikis, blogs, and forums, to help communities of practice share
their knowledge (Open Text, 2012).
A key problem in managing knowledge is the creation of an appropriate clas-
sification scheme, or taxonomy, to organize information into meaningful cat-
egories so that it can be easily accessed. Once the categories for classifying
knowledge have been created, each knowledge object needs to be “tagged,” or
classified, so that it can be easily retrieved. Enterprise content management
systems have capabilities for tagging, interfacing with corporate databases and
content repositories, and creating enterprise knowledge portals that provide a
single point of access to information resources.
Firms in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and entertainment have
special needs for storing and managing unstructured digital data such as pho-
tographs, graphic images, video, and audio content. For example, Coca-Cola
must keep track of all the images of the Coca-Cola brand that have been cre-
ated in the past at all of the company’s worldwide offices, to prevent both
redundant work and variation from a standard brand image. Digital asset
management systems help companies classify, store, and distribute these
digital objects.

KNOWLEDGE NETWORK SYSTEMS

Knowledge network systems, address the problem that arises when the
appropriate knowledge is not in the form of a digital document but instead
resides in the memory of individual experts in the firm. Knowledge network
systems provide an online directory of corporate experts and their profiles,
with details about their job experience, projects, publications, and educational
degrees. Search tools make it easy for employees to find the appropriate
expert in a company. Knowledge network systems such as Hivemine's AskMe
include repositories of expert-generated content. Some knowledge networking
capabilities are included in the leading enterprise content management, social
networking, and collaboration software products.

COLLABORATION AND SOCIAL TOOLS AND LEARNING
MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Chapters 2 and 7 have already discussed the importance of collaboration and
social tools for information sharing within the firm. For knowledge resources
outside the firm, social bookmarking makes it easier to search for and share
information by allowing users to save their bookmarks to Web pages on a public
Web site and tag these bookmarks with keywords. These tags can be used to
organize and search for text and images. Lists of tags can be shared with other
people to help them find information of interest. The user-created taxonomies
created for shared bookmarks are called folksonomies. Delicious, Slashdot,
and Pinterest are popular social bookmarking sites.
Suppose, for example, that you’re on a corporate team researching wind
power. If you did a Web search and found relevant Web pages on wind power,

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