A comparative analysis of the evolution of a taxonomy for best practices: a case for 'knowledge efficiency'

Taxonomies play an increasingly important role in knowledge management of business best practices, providing a basis by which to index, find and communicate knowledge. However, knowledge continues to evolve over time. As a result, taxonomies must also continue to evolve as organizations innovate and change. Reportedly, firms customize best-practice taxonomies to meet their unique organization needs. Accordingly, we might expect organizations to generate dissimilar best-practice taxonomies. However, taxonomies must also reflect the state of knowledge in the area being categorized, and thus are likely to be similar in many ways in different organizations. The purpose of this paper is to study how taxonomies change in different organizations and how they stay the same. In order to explain the parallels in organizational taxonomies, the notion of ‘knowledge artefact efficiency’ (or knowledge efficiency) is suggested to capture the concept that new knowledge is rapidly adopted by many organizations in their knowledge management systems. Copyright  2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.