Knowledge management: Challenges and Demands for Organizations

The importance of managing knowledge in organizations has been a growing topic of interest over the past decade. Yet, knowledge management (KM) poses a great many challenges to organizations and a majority of KM initiatives fail to deliver on their promise. Many experts and consulting firms emerge with their prescriptions for a successful KM effort and various fields in business and the social sciences probe specific factors from their unique frames. While this is all valuable, it is important to look across siloed bases in the literature and seek a more comprehensive and integrated understanding of the many challenges that KM introduces. This article will inventory and explore some of the most pressing challenges facing organizations choosing to embark on KM and aim to reframe KM as fundamentally an organization development intervention.