Peyman Akhavan - Department of management and industrial engineering, Malek Ashtar University of Technology,
Mohammad Fathian - Department of industrial engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology
Mostafa Jafari - Department of industrial engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology

Nowadays knowledge is recognized as an important enabler for competitive advantages and many companies are beginning to establish knowledge management systems. Within the last few years many organizations tried to design a suitable knowledge management system and many of them were successful. This paper is to discover critical success factors (CSF) of knowledge management (KM) and their relationships in an effective way. A qualitative case study technique has been used in this paper for data collection and analysis. In this way, grounded theory (GT) research approach has been selected .The collected data are categorized and analyzed through specific stages of GT. A semantic network has been developed by categorized data showing the relationships between the extracted CSFs and finally a theory has been emerged. The semantic network and the emerged theory show the roadmap of success in KM area for the organizations.

Knowledge management, Grounded theory, Qualitative research, Semantic network, Critical success factors, Theory building