Knowledge documentation and storage as a key challenge of knowledge management implementation in small and medium-sized KIBS companies

Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) companies have long been recognised as key players in modern economy since they positively affect the innovativeness of businesses and societies. Their business activities are mainly based on knowledge, which is both the input and the output of their production processes. Even if they have a small and medium size, the large majority of KIBS companies are aware that knowledge is their most crucial competitive resource. However, they manage their cognitive assets in a substantially informal and undeliberate way. Indeed, such companies meet with the difficulties and obstacles typically connected with a limited size, like e.g., scarcity of human and financial resources, lack of time, short-term orientation. Furthermore, KIBS SMEs face specific challenges, mainly raised by the intangible and knowledge-intensive nature of their business processes. One of the key issues concerns knowledge documentation and storage, which is essential to make retrieval and reuse of possessed knowledge easier for existing and newly hired employees In spite of the above, research about how small and medium sized KIBS companies manage knowledge documentation and storage processes, is still limited. To contribute to fill this gap, this paper examines what are the main difficulties that KIBS SMEs meet with when documenting and storing their knowledge, and how do they try to face and overcome these difficulties. In particular, the paper illustrates and discusses the findings of an empirical investigation that involved 13 Italian KIBS SMEs belonging to different sectors. The decision to adopt a multiple case study approach was induced by the exploratory nature of the research. The study revealed that knowledge documentation and storage is a widespread activity among the investigated companies, which confirms the relevance of these processes. The investigated companies are aware that poor documentation generates several problems that result in not responding client requests in time. In addition, the study allowed identifying some shared challenges that concern the whole document and storage process, as well as to collect useful indications about how to face such are faced by companies. The study has the usual limitations of a case study methodology, and especially the difficult generalization of the results. This paves the way for future research devoted to confirming what emerged from the present analysis, for example, by means of surveys.