Where knowledge is power there is bound to be reluctance to give it away. Companies adopting KM need to stay aware of the fact that they are in business to make money, not to generate information. On the output side of the equation, the challenge is to ensure that, once established, the system is used for the benefit of the company. In management consultancies not all consultants take readily to using the implemented systems. Senior staff are likely to be slower adopters than junior staff, perhaps because of a reluctance to accept that others might have more expertise in an area than they do.
Information overload is another potential problem.
Databases can become very large, difficult to navigate and slow to use, causing people to fall back on informal information-gathering or on asking contacts about which of the more formal sources of codified knowledge to use. This tacit knowledge includes skills and judgements, which may be taught by example or mentoring, or learnt through trial and error or by intuition. There are often limits to the extent that this tacit knowledge can be re-presented in explicit form and prolonged human interaction may be the only way to disperse it throughout an organization. Tacit knowledge is generally recognized as the more difficult of the two to manage and control but probably accounts for more of the total sum of knowledge held within a company than explicit knowledge does. An over-reliance on codified, database knowledge thus misses much of the potential a knowledge management system is supposed to tap.