Applied knowledge management: a set of well-tried tools

Purpose - For almost 20 years, knowledge management projects hit various domains. This paper aims to describe briefly a set of four well-tried knowledge management tools allowing practitioners to analyse and structure, describe and represent, share and store, teach and transmit knowledge.Design methodology approach - This paper focuses on selected tools now of general practice and becoming popular among the practitioners.Findings - The paper finds that, originally out of the information science laboratories, the tools introduced here have been proved tested efficient and reliable after hundreds of real projects, no matter what type of industry and domain use them. This now common practice should open the path to new models for the knowledge economy. Dealing with complexity becomes easier as well as putting the information system at the crossing of the interactive information flows instead of keeping it out of reach of a majority of knowledge workers. Because of the massive retirement of the baby boomers, a large loss of workforce challenges the companies for the first time in history. How to evaluate and pass to the next generation its core business of knowledge is thus of critical importance.Originality value - This paper reminds that knowledge management is no longer a solely academic issue since tools of the next generation are now available, beefing up the growing domain of the knowledge economy.