Barriers to knowledge sharing in ICT project environments

Project management supports much of the economic activity in various industries. Across the public sector, effective management of projects transforms taxpayer funds into new schools, hospitals, roads, construction and technology. However, numerous, particularly ICT-enabled, public sector projects fail to succeed as is reflected by ongoing public discourse and negative perceptions. The aim of this research-in-progress paper is to increase our understanding of what constitutes success in these environments and how it can be facilitated. To this end, a methodical literature review is conducted to survey traditional and modern views of critical success factors. Secondly, the role of knowledge management in project management is analysed with an emphasis on knowledge sharing. Based on the findings, we hypothesise that barriers to knowledge sharing contribute to poor performance of some public sector ICT projects and develop a conceptual framework for a proposed research study to address this problem.