An empirical study on KM default in product lifecycle

Nowadays, concerning organizations’ needs as well as emphasis from academia, an increasing endeavor from organizations to design and implement knowledge management projects is evident. However, implementation of any project, particularly in preliminary phases, could render some degree of risk and threat. Thus, it is obvious that failure in recognizing and managing those risks could bring about unsuccessfulness within an organization. In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to find the most important factors influencing knowledge management (KM) implementation in one of industries in Iran. The proposed study designed a questionnaire, distributed among most of the workers, and analyzed the results. The study divided KM implementation in four stages of planning, execution, development and institutional. We have also considered four important factors within each stage. The results indicate that culture was the most important barrier during all four stages. In addition, technology was an important issue during the execution stage while content was important during the development stage.