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1. Introduction
Organizations, today, face several challenges to keep their businesses going and to grow effectively in a competitive world. Among these challenges are high employee turnover, drastically expanding digitized information, also known as big data, the need to make quick and accurate decisions, the need to eliminate redundancy of efforts, and the need for strong collaboration among employees. These challenges and others can be smoothed in organizations by implementing effective knowledge management practices using technological solutions. These solutions, namely knowledge management systems (KMS), are electronic systems which are used by organizations to create, capture, organize, and share knowledge among organization employees.
The Jeddah Municipality (JM) in Saudi Arabia has developed a KMS to solve the above challenges and others. This paper describes JM efforts In KMS. It first describes learning organizations in which people continue to learn and grow and knowledge management practices in general. It later describes the use of technology in knowledge management and the JM Knowledge Center which is an example of a KMS and its many features. The paper then proposes a technology knowledge management taxonomy, which was developed as a result of an extensive three-year investigation of the different types of knowledge resources which exist or can be used in the Jeddah Municipality, as an example of a large size organization, coupled with a thorough review of the literature in the fields of KM and learning organizations. The taxonomy contains types of existing electronic tools that can be used to support one or more of the different types of KM processes when used by an organization. An organization can select a subset of these tools to cover all KM areas in order to have a full implementation of electronic KM tools. The taxonomy can be used as a guide for implementers of successful KM systems and KM strategists in organizations, from which they can choose the appropriate set of KM tools to cover the main KM processes.
2. Learning organizations and knowledge management
In recent years, the concepts of learning organizations, in which people are continually learning, and knowledge management, which addresses the handling and preservation of organizational knowledge, are two concepts which gained much attention. It has even been claimed that performance and improvement in an organization are...