Leveraging Knowledge Management in everyday practice

Other conference contribution, 2004

It is widely recognised that contributions from all organisational members are an important prerequisite for successful KM systems. Concurring with this, I argue that KM systems must be designed so that the technology itself actively affords user participation. Drawing upon experiences from my work with three KM systems implementations at Volvo in Sweden and lessons learned from the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) in the 1980’s, I shall present general design principles describing how KM systems can be integrated with everyday work to leverage user practices. The objective is to demonstrate how KM systems can be designed to better support knowledge application in organisational knowledge work processes and at the same time avoiding the maintenance problem mentioned above.