There Is No Knowledge without Terminology: Key Factors for Organisational Learning

Abstract

Any company or organisation in the world has to manage its knowledge. For some it may be sufficient to have the knowledge in their brains. But as products and services are subject to constant innovation, most of the companies and organisations acting in the global market or on an international level find themselves confronted with the task of constantly updating, referencing, tracking and managing knowledge. Marketing material, speeches on conferences and sophisticated tools make us believe that it is easy to keep track of information in a company or organisation, to use single source publishing, touch each content only once, have it centrally stored and reuse it for multiple purposes. How many of you have really achieved this goal or know organisations, where all content-related processes run smoothly and are fed by a central knowledge base? Is it actually realistic to follow the ideal of ONE central knowledge base in a company / organisation or just an utopian idea? We will have a closer look at challenges and possible solutions for innovative organisations and companies when managing units of knowledge represented in the form of technical words or “terms” in one or more languages.