Paper delivered at CROINFO 2004, Zagreb, Croatia, 3-4 May 2004 Leveraging Knowledge Management activities in everyday practice Dr. Dick Stenmark Göteborg University Department of Informatics P.O.Box 620 S-40530 Göteborg, Sweden Phone: +46 31 7735566 Email: stenmark@informatik.gu.se 1. Introduction Ever since man first shared the knowledge of how to make fire with his fellow human beings, the managing of knowledge has been employed by masters training their apprentices and by parents teaching their children. Managing knowledge is hence no new phenomenon. In recent years, however, the importance of knowledge in business and industry has risen dramatically, and shifted from being one resource amongst many to becoming the primary resource. Being able to effectively manage this resource has thus received the attention of many chief executives and Knowledge Management (KM) as a concept has become a vividly debated topic. Although knowing is a profoundly human ability, and acknowledging that an organisation’s ability to apply its knowledge depends heavily on social factors, many commentators have argued that information technology (IT) can have a positive influence on an organisation’s KM processes. Attempts have been made to design and apply many sorts of IT artefacts for creating, storing, transferring, and applying knowledge, and software vendors offer a multitude of knowledge management systems (KMS). Practical results from KMS research, however, suggest that these systems often fail when implemented in the everyday practice of modern organisations. One possible explanation for the under-utilisation that I have come across in my research is the imbalance between the additional workload required by the organisational members and accuracy and timeliness of the content needed for the KMS to be attractive (see Lindgren and Stenmark, 2002). This imbalance leads to a maintenance problem, which in turn results in systems that are of little use for the organisations. Although KM systems maintenance has been acknowledged as an important research issue, it remains a serious practical problem for organisations and there is little advice to find in the literature. However, as indicated in my recent research, there are ways forward (see Stenmark & Lindgren, 2004).