Designing a Knowledge Management System

In the past four years, I've managed to implement for about 3 Knowledge Management Systems in 3 large listed enterprises, one is a railway company, one is a sport company and the other is an international sourcing and retail company. I want to share my view on the succeed factors of building a KM system in a real world:

• Sell it as a corporate-wide initiative and secure funding and supports from top management
• Select a group of KM champions in every business unit
• Choose a right software platform
• Design a simple document taxonomy
• Build a community of practice
• Connecting people using web 2.0 technologies
• Keep the content of KM portal flash and up-to-date

A knowledge handbook of a great KM project in Hong Kong.

Critical-Thinking Questions [1]

• Why would a company need a system for managing knowledge?
• How is knowledge managed at your organization? Is there a centralized repository in place, or do you engage in impromptu sharing?
• How would you organize your project documentation, so that it is convenient for you?
• How do you see your company's business processes changing, if you implemented a knowledge-management system?
• For a knowledge-management system to be successful, the technical architect should select the KMS based on what criteria?
• What is the ROI of the knowledge-management system? How would you go about measuring it?

Articles on KM:
Architecting a Knowledge-Management System [1]
Six ways to make Web 2.0 work