Strategic planning for knowledge management implementation in engineering firms

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of leveraging organizational knowledge to deliver long‐term advantage to a business and is based on a business strategy that involves engineering various knowledge‐centric business processes and developing organization structures to support these. These, in turn, require technology to capture, codify, store, disseminate and reuse the knowledge. Successful deployment of KM is not a simple process. This paper suggests that a major reason for the failure of many KM projects is the absence of a well‐defined strategic plan to guide implementation. This paper discusses the strategic planning needs of the KM deployment process, and develops a framework that could be used specifically by engineering firms to guide the KM implementation process.