Knowledge Management Culture Audit: Capturing Tacit Perceptions and Barriers

A firm’s capacity to efficiently create value from knowledge held by employees and embedded in processes is a key strategic resource. Knowledge Management (KM) seeks to systematically improve that capacity. The first critical step for implementing KM in organizations is the Knowledge Audit. Current audit practices use interviews and questionnaires to understand the KM processes that the organization holds and improved KM processes it wishes to implement, and to explore the organizational culture. In this paper we introduce the concept of capturing tacit cultural perceptions to identify cultural barriers that may interfere with a KM initiative. For this purpose, an analysis instrument was developed and used during the KM audit in a large international software development organization.