Knowledge management success or failure - what determines the performance of a KM-initiative?

Abstract

While the importance of Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives is obvious today, successfully implementing KM initiatives still poses a challenge. In this contribution we argue that an overview and integration of existing knowledge about success factors is missing and is part of the problem. Consequently we show the results of a literature review on KM success factor literature. Out of 180 publications that deal with success factors, we determined the nine most relevant publications that can be seen as representative. Homogenizing the nine different publications' terminology, we identified twelve commonly used success factors and elaborate their interpretation with respect to their contribution to KM success. As a first, qualitative step towards showing the dependency between the twelve success factors we propose to arrange them in a three-dimensional model.