The Olympic Games and knowledge management: A case study of the Sydney organising committee of the Olympic Games

This paper uses the context of the Sydney Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (SOCOG) as a case study. It examines how information and knowledge management (KM) were utilised through a specific knowledge project (the Sydney 2000 Games Information System) in an event‐driven organisation with a limited lifespan and increasing staff numbers. This project helped ensure that SOCOG's KM processes became aligned with the corporate objective of sharing knowledge across the organisation, rather than it remaining in the programs or divisions where it was created. The article is written from personal experience and outlines SOCOG's KM growth and development from an information management approach into a wider knowledge management role, assisted by a technology solution. As a commercial knowledge legacy, there was a formal agreement signed between the IOC and SOCOG, which formalised SOCOG's selling of explicit and tacit knowledge. However we believe that the most important lesson that other event organisers can learn from the SOCOG KM project is that accurate and accessible information can be managed effectively throughout a growing organisation.