Organizational Development for Knowledge Management at Water ...

Knowledge Taxonomy*
A structured set of names and descriptions used to organize information and knowledge in a
consistent way.
Supports: knowledge sharing, search and retrieval, decision-making
LEVEL OF EFFORT
SIZE OF UTILITY
SCOPE OF WORK
HIGH
SCALABLE
WIDE
A taxonomy is an agreed-upon vocabulary of topics arranged around specific themes. For
example, effective use of an organizational taxonomy enables a common language that both
engineers and technicians can use to access needed information and communicate and
understand each other no matter who has stored it. Classification becomes more and more
important as the number of items increases and people have trouble remembering what they
have and where to find it. It becomes very useful when organizations have access to large
amounts of information available via global electronic networking.
Creating an orderly method of classifying and relating knowledge is tremendously complex.
Consider the enormous quantity of written, spoken and visual information that occurs and is
stored somewhere in your drinking water utility, then consider where it occurs and resides. Your
utility may have multiple technology systems with many legacy applications, have limited
resources to capture critical information and processes, and rely on a variety of external experts
as needs emerge. Further, (1) even in the same organization people use different words for
similar concepts, and (2) people often use the same words to convey different concepts
depending upon the context of an exchange, what we think other people already know or don’t
know, and how it relates to other activities and thoughts.
A typical taxonomy is based on a logical arrangement, usually hierarchical, and built on an
organization’s natural workflow and knowledge needs in an intuitive structure (with ―intuitive‖
representing a shared understanding of a specific domain of information). Examples of
taxonomies are the Standard Subject Identification Code (SSIC), the Library of Congress
Classification (LOCC) and the Dewey Decimal System. As we build a classification scheme, we
define topics and order them based on relative importance to our organization and their level of
detail. For example, water treatment and sewage treatment are included in the Dewey Decimal
System under Environment Protection Engineering (see below) because they are specific
instances of the general field.
Sample of Dewey Decimal System
600 Technology & Applied Sciences
628 Environment Protection Engineering
628.1 Water Supply
C-84
628.162 Water
Treatment
628.3 Sewage
Treatment
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