For knowledge repositories to be meaningful, their structure must reflect die structure of shared mental models or contextual knowledge tacitly held by the organization.
In most organizations, those structures are neither well-defined nor widely shared. Yet their explication is essential for effectively managing explicitly encoded organizational knowledge.
This requires defining what is meant by a knowledge- unit and how that collection of knowledge units should be meaningfully indexed and categorized for ease of access, retrieval, exchange, and integration.
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Creating “semantic consensus” even within common practice communities is often a difficult task, let alone across an entire organization.
Different lexicons emerge from different parts of an organization. Standards are in many ways counter to the culture of many organizations. However, the ability to integrate and share knowledge depends on some broadly meaningful scheme for its structure.
Integration of knowledge across different contexts opens an organization to new insights. A practice community’s exposure to how its knowledge can be applied in other contexts increases the scope and value of that knowledge.
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Often the variety of experiences within a local community of practice is not great enough to fully understand some phenomenon. By being able to combine experiences across communities, the variation of experience is enlarged, as is the ability to learn from those experiences.
Repository Life Cycle:
Knowledge repositories have a life cycle that must be managed. Once created, they tend to grow, reaching a point where they begin to collapse under their own weight, requiring major reorganization.
Their rejuvenation requires deleting obsolete content, archiving less active but potentially useful content, and reorganizing what is left. Content or topic areas may become fragmented or redundant.
Reorganizing requires eliminating those redundancies, combining similar contributions, generalizing content for easier reapplication, and restructuring categories as needed. Successful KM organizations proactively manage and reorganize their repositories as an ongoing activity rather than waiting for decline to set in before acting.