Social Business - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 136

FIGURE 4.11
Using Second Life to host a conference.
planning and control of actions—to develop these into knowledge assets
that will enable a business to generate profits and/or increase its com-
petitive position. The major focus of knowledge management is to iden-
tify and gather content from documents, reports, and other sources and
to be able to search that content for meaningful relationships. A variety
of business-intelligence, artificial-intelligence, and content-management
methodologies and tools are the framework under which knowledge
management operates.
Groups of individuals who share knowledge about a common work
practice over a period of time, even though they are not part of a formally
constituted work team, are considered to be “communities of practice.”
Communities of practice (CoPs) generally cut across traditional organi-
zational boundaries. They enable individuals to acquire new knowledge
faster. They may also be called “communities of interest” if the people
share an interest in something but do not necessarily perform the work
on a daily basis. For example, in one government agency, a group of
employees who were actively involved in multiparty, multi-issue settle-
ment negotiations began a monthly discussion group during which they