Senior Advisor to the CEO| PMISterling, Va, United States
I've seen a number of approaches implemented within various organizations. Most of the serious ones involve balanced scorecards. Personally, I've never seen a measurement system that everyone was completely happy with - but I guess that's the nature of the beast.
Here's the section of gantthead that deals with KM Measurement. Saving Changes...
Anonymous
I think it really depends on the purpose of the knowledge management program.
I developed a knowledge management database in Lotus Notes with the purpose of reduce the number of calls from my internal customers and business partners. The database is a repository of company policies and procedures, best practices, forms and reports available from various sources.
Considering the size of the company I work for (75,000 employees) and the number of people involved with asset management I believe the database has a fair traffic rate - about 1,300 hits / month.
One of the tools in Lotus Notes is that tou can track who is accessing the database. Using this information I'm able to send periodic surveys to users in order to improve and add content.
Senior Advisor to the CEO| PMISterling, Va, United States
Arnaldo, you're definitely right. Looking at who is using your system is certainly a measure of who you are serving best. More of these types of measurements can be found, here. You can use these numbers to refocus your efforts periodically & better understand how to improve the system as a whole over time.
When Thomas initially asked the question, I was thinking more from the perspective of expressing the effectiveness to upper management. (quantifying how it improves the way the company does business, etc.) - which actually plays into the call count goals you mentioned. If you can show that the system reduces phone support by X percent, that translates into something that management can really relate to & respect. Saving Changes...
I've been implementing a Balanced Scorecard. Some of the measures was related to knowledge management. The measuring system need to reflect the maturity of the organization. In this case we had no formal knowledge management process or system in place. We started to mesure the percentage of the employees that had a knowledge management plan developed and in progress (collected from lotus notes). In addition we measured the number of gatherings in the different knowledge network groups (2 gateherings per network a year was the goal). The last measure was on knowledge sharing by testing the managers concience (0 to 100% sharing). Saving Changes...
Michael WoodProject Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent ContractorGig Harbor, Wa, United States
Knowledge Management, hmmmmmm. Measuring gains in knowledge within an organization should be tied to how those gains have added value to the organization's stakeholders. Of course this would require that clear and measurable value gain expectations are well stated. The system is not nearly as critical as the outcomes achieved. In my experience too much emphasis has been placed on the tools and not enough on the real goal, improving the value that can be delivered consistantly over time to stakeholders. Whether it is internal knowledge (learning based), competitive knowledge (researched based)it should only be meausered in terms of value contributed. Saving Changes...
One company that seems to have an edge in this area is RightNow Technologies (www.RightNow.com). Their product has a great deal of usability to it, and has several interesting ways of determining savings. Check it out at your leisure. And no, I'm not affiliated with the company--I just evaluated it for possible implementation in the company I work for. Saving Changes...
Seems to me that to prove value, or worth,one must tie KM to performance, measurable performance improviement, and/or reduction in operating cost... right.
Training is KM ... it is the transformation of Information into Knowledge for fun and profit, is it not? Then, read this for measuring return on the transformation of information into knowledge! Saving Changes...
I think the only real meaningful measures of knowledge management effectiveness come from looking for measureable improvement in specific core business processes. E.g., if the process of responding to RFPs used to take X effort, and by targeting KM at that process you reduce the effort by 20%, then that is a meaningful measure.
You can also measure the amount of "stuff" you capture, organize and distribute, and you can solicit feedback on what stuff people are using and how they are using it, but these measures are not as meaningful.
Remember that in general you get what you measure -- good measures: - Are accurate - Are objective - Contain one or more dimensions (e.g., time) - Include targets (e.g., 75% faster) - Balance the trade-off between cost/quality, and between speed/flexibility - Are clear to all involved - Support the organization's strategy Saving Changes...
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