With version control management, “As you’re going through audits, you’re tracking changes and deviations to your processes,” Taliano added. “We have a lot of compliance features for managing that type of information that’s a fairly defined set of workflow processes.” Additionally, the capacity to correctly version knowledge and documents is foundational to the reusability of not just those individual items, but also to enterprise knowledge in general. “You have lots and lots of contracts, all the drafts, and all that stuff is very important for governance,” Smith observed. “But ultimately, for the lawyer to potentially reuse that information, they need to know the final version of that document, and maybe the pre-negotiated version of that document. You don’t really care about the other versions of it in the future.”
Going Forward
KM makes problem-solving reusable by rendering enterprise knowledge orderly, searchable, accessible, and compliant. Granted, some of the pillars upon which KM is based are shifting, which the rise of folksonomies (as an expansion of the notion of taxonomies) indicates.
Yet even in the midst of the most revolutionary of technologies—which many would say the ubiquity of language models heralds—the fundamentals of having vertical-specific solutions, meta-data models, workflows, and processes are ultimately what makes knowledge reusable.