Knowledge Management is a necessary and integral part of an effective and successful support organization, yet it is also a buzzword that is perhaps over-hyped and over-used. How can a support operation initiate a KM project in a manner that will bring them up to speed quickly, efficiently and at a low cost, while still positioning them to take advantage of current and future trends in the industry? This paper will explore the lessons learned by one organization, the Center for Information Technology (CIT) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). CIT initiated a KM project in 1996, building a Knowledge Base that now contains over 10,000 discrete knowledge objects. The paper's focus will not be on hardware, software, bits or bytes, but rather we will look at what steps an organization can take to build a successful KM initiative from the ground up. These lessons can be applied to any organization regardless of their technical infrastructure already in place. Keywords knowledge ...