[quoting Deijmann, 25 May 99] The idea of knowledge management is a fake; at least if you look at the theories and attempts of those who think they can store knowledge on computers. They will fail.
I understand knowledge management differently. I believe that in an organization or for that matter any social structure, one can store the experiences and learnings of different individuals in a database. Then, by designing intelligent questions, we can retrieve a lot of learning from people who may have gone through a similar experience before. This will obviously prevent reinventing the wheel over and over.
However, after retrieving the answers, it is still left to the person to decide what to do with the information that he/she has got. it is quite possible that what may have worked at a particular point in time may be completely redundant now (happens all the time in the place where I work).