Tagging Turns Knowledge Management on Its Head

For sheer usability and ability to tap into user goodwill by making them a part of the process (a key tenet of Web 2.0), few sites rival del.icio.us and flickr. Both utilize social tagging or bookmarking, which allows folks to mark items of interest and easily share them with others.
  
   According to a recent Pew Internet & America Life Project survey, 28 percent of U.S. Internet users have tagged user-generated online content. We think this adoption rate successfully demonstrates tagging's broad appeal -- it isn't just for geeks.
  
   It's a consumer trend that shows real potential in the enterprise, where its ease of use and practical benefits practically guarantee user buy-in.
  
   Gartner singled out tagging in its recent list of seven core benefits that Web 2.0 can bring to the enterprise, noting that it can beef up collaboration and make it easier to navigate internal and external information sources.
  
   IBM certainly thinks so, and made a tagging feature called Dogear a focal point of its new suite of social software, Lotus Connections. The author of this IT-Director.com article sees tagging as nothing less than "a reinvention of knowledge management that turns traditional thinking on its head," by allowing users to generate taxonomies that are far more useful and flexible than those produced through more traditional means.
  
   As IBM has now thrown its considerable weight behind the enterprise tagging concept, plenty of smaller vendors have been promoting it as well. This FASTForward blogger spotlights a company called Connectbeam, which shows good sense by including specific workflows, security settings and other enterprise-friendly features in its product.