New Free Paper on Knowledge Management Failure Factors Released

Jan. 25, 2014 - PRLog -- Knowledge management has become a fairly controversial subject over the last 15 years. What started out as a buzzword has evolved to something that firm's are sometimes afraid to implement. One of the main reasons for this is the large and often dramatic number of failures experienced within this discipline. Over the years, many studies and many theorists have attempted to identify the reasons for knowledge management failures.

On January 24, a new paper was released on knowledge-management-tools.net, which offers a synthesis of all the major factors from knowledge management literature from the last 10-15 years. The paper is available for download from the site, either from the top left hand corner on all pages or from the download link on the following webpage: http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/fail.html

"I wanted to write a paper that would be useful for both practitioners and theorists alike," said Alan Frost M.Sc., the author of the paper and owner of knowledge-management-tools.net. "KM has such a rich body of literature, but because of its inherent broad nature as well as studies with very different approaches and focus areas, it can often be quite difficult to know where to start. I hope that this paper provides a useful tool for anyone wanting to understand what causes failure in knowledge management."

The paper organizes the failure factors into two broad categories – causal and resultant – which can roughly be likened to diseases and symptoms. 6 broad causal factor categories and 7 broad resultant factor categories are presented and discussed. The paper does not attempt to link specific factors nor does it attempt to offer a prescriptive solution. Instead, the goal is to unite the body of work on this subject into a single source.

This paper is released under Creative Commons license: Attribution CC BY, which allows distribution, modifications, extensions, etc. of this work for both commercial and non-commercial purposes, providing that the attribution is provided (in the form of author name and a link to http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/failure.html).