Knowledge Management projects often start with introduction of new or improved Information Technology solutions where Databases and Data Representation in various Forms are involved. Objective of such projects is the effort to improve corporate performance by sharing information amongst employees. Despite the rosy picture some vendors paint there are areas in such projects often overlooked that bring a good project idea to downfall in the realisation.

Online systems for compiling and sharing knowledge throughout an organization are popular and useful when they are a real fit to the organizations requirements and objectives. Otherwise such projects will die a silent death in operational use, or other phenomenoms arise that have its root cause in the social system of the organization making it usefull only to a limited circle of people.

Basic to Knowledge Management is to share data across the organization and representing data to employees based on their current relevance. Already here lies one of the first traps to IT based Knowledge Management projects: How to determine the relevancy such that raw data from the corporate databases render the maximum amount of information within ever changing relevance criterias? That relevancy is the key for any person to turn data into information that is interpreted by those. Relevancies are comparable to a set of glasses through which we look at data. A different color or type of glasses used to read the same data will change the way we see and interpret it.

The next trap is that any cookie-cutter aproach across different organizational areas carries a high probability to failure. Successfull implementation in one area of the organization, lets say a Call Center, will get a complete disaster when deployed as copy to a different area of the organization, say Accounting. The relevancies of these different organizational areas are completely different, so that the same approach that did work for the Call Center will - with high probapility - fail in Accounting.

Another trap are complex IT systems that even might have grown over time. The higher complex the existing IT structure is, the higher level of challenge will be to get those systems to share data amongst them. Which is the first step in any Knowledge Management project that is targeted to use a IT solution. Here the intercommunication challenge between different system standards may already soon render to be too high to accomplish common accessible and interrelated data. And with that stopping the project already before it got off the ground.

Projects that will rely on employee contribution to the operational IT Knowledge-Management system soon will face with phenomenons outside its technological realm, namely the employees - the human users within the organization. Here Management quickly might choose any type of reward and review system to foster contributions and high quality of those. The dynamics of the organizational social system may here create effects such as closed groups of contributors that highly influence the procedures of information contribution.

Next to it is also that in contribution based systems information requires to be turned into data, and that requires to also describe the relevancies in which that said data has been generated. All what a human contributor is able to explizit any form of knowledge in written language is within his own and current framework of relevancies. Without also describing the form the current frame of relevancy with it, other users of contribution based systems may read those - intentionally or even unintentionally - as different information as the stored data with altered relevancies will generate different sets of information.

This shows that putting technology into place does in no direct way guarantee a certain result, especially in the complex field of Knowledge. Partnering with with us in such IT oriented approach to Knowledge Management in your Organization will help to avoid such traps that are otherwise expensive experiences that may well be avoided.