Is your Knowledge Management Strategy working?

 

The KM framework is constantly evolving in the past decades. The importance of managing and leveraging organization’s intellectual knowledge capital to gain competitive advantage has been stressed enough. With the ever-changing business goals, KM is now seen more and more as an integrated mechanism to bring together functional silos rather than an independent operation to manage intellectual knowledge.  Even though the KM framework varies from organization to organization based on the business structure, goals and operations, the evolution of communities, personalization approach with stress on collaborative culture, informal meet ups are some of the trends seen across organizations with end goal to create an environment that is cohesive to knowledge sharing and capturing.

However, for KM to succeed and to grow and align with the changing organizational trends and business needs, comes the need to evaluate its performance and measure its success against the defined goals. This will pave the path for reinventing KM strategy and using it successfully for gaining edge over competitors.

Find below some of the metrics you can incorporate in your KM framework to measure its health and success:

Community usage and business value: How the KM community is faring and helping its members via community metrics dashboard and users’ survey can give a good glimpse of health of the Community and KM practice.

  • The number of visits to the KM Communities
  • The number of Community members
  • Number of questions asked on discussion forums and response time.
  • Best practices and process documents shared.
  • Feedback received in the regular user feedback survey.
  • New content added to the community and the #times downloaded.

Content Harvested: One of the key components of KM is to gather knowledge, insights, success stories and lessons learnt that can be repurposed by other employees in their work. Therefore, keeping a periodical metrics to keep a track of content harvested and repurposed can provide clean insights into how your KM practice is faring.

Campaigns and participation: There are end number of campaigns you can run (few examples listed below) to support KM initiatives leading to Innovation which is one of the KM end-goal. So doing a pre and post metrics to measure success of campaign can give you an insight into your KM success.

  • Innovation ideation campaigns where people come together to ideate on a specific topic and come up with innovate ideas to improve processes and applications. The number of participants, ideas generated as well as implemented can be great metrics to show the business results of KM.
  • Virtual cafes and learning sessions to create awareness around specific tool, application or topic are great way to connect Subject matter experts, and leadership to their team members. No of participants, questions asked and answered, lessons learnt and implemented is a great metrics to track.
  • Live stream sessions and panel discussions are again interesting KM channels to disseminate KM and the metrics can be easily tracked via the questions asked, topics discussed, feedback received.

Lessons learnt: From all the above, it is vital to track the lessons captured and used. How people who participated or used above channels to download knowledge, actually used it to make their work easy, or save time and money on reproducing that information is a critical metrics that is aligned to the key business objective of repurposing intellectual knowledge to achieve business advantage.  

KM strategy needs to be agile and keep evolving with the changing customer and business needs. However, to make it effective and successful, you need to quantify and measure it continuously for it to work and achieve your business objectives and enhance customer satisfaction.

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