The development of an instrument to measure readiness for knowledge management

Implementing knowledge management (KM) projects or knowledge-sharing philosophies in organizations requires significant organization change. Because the introduction of change is difficult, leaders have been encouraged to proactively prepare their organizations and its members as they begin one of these initiatives. As the first step in this process, managers should comprehensively examine their organization's underlying readiness to embrace these initiatives. Unfortunately, the measurement of an organization's readiness for KM initiatives poses significant challenges because no known instrument is available to do so. Accordingly, this study drew on the KM and organizational change literature to take a first step in the development of a synergistic instrument that measures readiness for KM and applied it in an organizational setting.