When Tom Rossi, director of the Innovation Lab at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., began a knowledge management initiative in 1999, he thought he knew everything. Rossi and his team were charged with creating a futuristic environment for computerized war games. The games, held annually for more than 20 years, have about 500 senior military and civilian players who need to share real-time information about troop deployments, battle readiness and the battlefield environment. Prior to Rossi’s KM project, the gamer commanders had to gather information via phone calls, memos, e-mails and game books?none of which encouraged the kind of instantaneous decision-making necessary in combat situations.

Rossi and his team put together a KM system that integrated a collaborative software suite, a naval war games software tool and Microsoft Exchange’s Conferencing Server for Internet video and chat capabilities. In the year between games, Rossi worked with engineers and a metrics team to fine-tune the system. They tailored the command and control databases so that various commanders had access to the same information; as one group of officers plotted troop positions and battle tactics, other participants lower down the chain of command could see the plans as they formed and anticipate what their own tasks would be.

In theory, Rossi’s project sounded great. But by 2001, the technology bogged down. "We had gadgets and tools, but when we brought the gamers together, it became clear that we’d given them too much IT," Rossi says. "By the time we brought them up to speed on the new tools, the game was well underway and they got frustrated fast."

As a result, the 2002 war games were canceled.

Rossi’s misstep is a common one. While KM is a sound field with real benefits such as reduced training time for new employees, improved decision making and better operational efficiency, it’s difficult to get it right. "The biggest misconception that IT leaders make is that knowledge management is about technology," says Shir Nir, managing partner at Knowledge Transformation Partners (KTP), a KM consultancy based in New York City. "Usually people begin a KM project by focusing on the technology needs, whether they want a database or a portal. But the key is people and process."

It’s natural for CIOs to focus on technology, and many vendors are happy to oblige them by marketing so-called off-the-shelf KM systems. Yet as Rossi and countless others have learned, there’s no cookie-cutter approach to adopting knowledge management. Every organization and company has its own definition of knowledge and how it should be gathered, categorized and made available to employees. What works for one company won’t work for another because organizational knowledge is so subjective.