Knowledge Management Tools and Their Desirable Characteristics

The Knowledge Management (KM) is a recent discipline that was born under the idea of explicitly managing the whole existing knowledge of a given organisation (Wiig, 1995) (Wiig et al., 1997). More specifically, the KM involves providing the people concerned with the right information and knowledge at the most suitable level for them, when and how best suit them; in such way, these people will have all the necessary ingredients for choosing the best option when faced with a specific problem (Rodríguez, 2002). As the knowledge, together with the ability for its best management, has turned into the key factor for the organizations to stand out, it is desirable to determine and develop the support instruments for the generation of such value within the organisations. This situation has been commonly accepted by several authors as (Brooking, 1996) (Davenport & Prusak, 2000) (Huang et al., 1999) (Liebowitz & Beckman, 1998) (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) and (Wiig, 1993) among others. Technological tools should be available for diminishing the communication distance and for providing a common environment where the knowledge might accessible for being stored or shared. As KM is a very recent discipline, there are few commercial software tools that deal with those aspects necessary for its approach. Most of the tools classified as KM-related are mere tools for managing documents, which is unsuitable for the correct management of the organisations knowledge. Bearing such problem in mind, the present work approaches the establishment of a KM support software tool based on the own definition of KM and on the existing tools. For achieving this, section 2 presents the market analysis that was performed for studying the existing KM tools, where not only their characteristics were analysed, but also the future needs of the knowledge workers. Following this study, the functionality that a KM support tool should have and the proposal for the best approach to that functionality were identified.