The following 3 factors need to be assessed for the successful management of knowledge:

• Technique – e.g. database has already been created
• Organisation – all colleagues have to be informed to share information and conclusions to a database. Check it in 2 months. Still empty? Why is that?
• Human being: needs motivation

All three aspects need to be considered. The database is in place and in operation. What happens to people then? Has anyone explained to them how the database works? Were they given enough time to feed information to the database? Were they asked to share important personal data? Why would they do that? Have they been motivated in any way? If these are done, the technical implementation might also be too complicated and takes too much time. So we need to check all these three elements.

Procedures applied for key tasks

In practise, there will always be a mixture of both tasks and activities in the company. But analysing and finding key business activities of individuals and teams will make decision easier to find and to introduce proper KM tools.

There are tools that are more suitable to support „Codification” – that means helping to store and to transfer explicit knowledge. Others rather support “Personalisation” – to make it “visible”, and to transfer tacit knowledge, expert knowledge which is stored in the expert’ brain.