How to prevent reinventing the wheel? - Design principles for project knowledge management systems

Abstract

Today, many companies still struggle in documenting and reusing the knowledge gained by project teams. However, knowledge only creates value if it is applied. There exists a vast amount of research in the field of knowledge management focusing on documentation, storage and exchange of knowledge, but knowledge reuse is often omitted by researchers. The presented work aims to close this gap by developing a project knowledge management system enabling project teams to apply company-internal knowledge. We followed an action design research approach to explore meta-requirements in a case company, translate these requirements into design principles and test the design principles by evaluating an artifact of a project knowledge management system. By our work, the knowledge management research field can benefit since our design theory extends the existing body of knowledge. Furthermore, our research results are instantiated in a concrete artifact which can be directly transferred into practice. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.