Starting KM in Your Organization: Here’s Your Strategic Road Map (Tenth Stop: Set Up Your Metrics)
Guy St. Clair
The question we’re exploring: If you were given the task of starting KM in your organization, how would you begin? Let’s continue with our strategic road map:
Keep in mind that your KM start-up initiative won’t amount to much if you and your team can’t describe your progress. Milestones for monitoring and measuring success along the way have to be in place, and there are any number of management resources that can be brought into play.
One place to begin is to ask, “What factors influence success in this company?” In Critical Success Factors: Management Metrics, Return-on-Investment, and Effectiveness Measures for Knowledge Services, Dale Stanley and I came up with these:
1. Is the acquisition of selected information, knowledge, and strategic learning management tools cost-effective?
2. Are the costs of maintaining these knowledge assets higher than the benefits?
3. How well are knowledge assets supporting strengthened decision making, accelerated innovation, and improved research in the company?
4. Does the structure for managing intellectual capital match the corporate function? (For example, is there a need for a stand-alone functional unit devoted to providing and/or managing one or another of the several types of research assets required by the larger enterprise? Or should assets be managed in relation to the functions they support?)
Finally, as you think about how (and what) you’ll measure, ask these questions:
1. Who will be receiving the information and making judgments based on the metrics?
2. What do those people want (or need) to know?
3. How will the metrics be used? Are decisions based on these metrics?
Give serious thought to how you will measure KM, knowledge services, and the connection between the company’s knowledge strategy and its overall effectiveness. Don’t get weighed down with so many details that you lose track of what you’re measuring, and be sure that you speak with others who understand what you’re doing and can help you establish milestones.
Above all, be flexible. None of what you’re doing is “carved in stone” and more than anything else, you want to set up a knowledge development and knowledge sharing (KD/KS) framework. If you’re measuring what you’re doing, your KM start-up is on its way to success.
- Guy St. Clair
Next Stop: Journey’s End?
Dear Guy:
This is so helpful – I’m actually interviewing for a knowledge management job!
Best,
Judy Lee
Hazel Strachan at LinkedIn’s Knowledge Management Group writes:
I have been reading the literature on KM and I find that organization culutre is one of the key determinants of the successful implementation of km. The process of learning is often curtailed by the relational and emotional issues inherent in the politics of organizing.
Guy St. Clair responds: You’re absolutely correct, Hazel, and it’s one of the big issues we have to deal with, almost on an on-going basis. The success of knowledge services, which brings together information management, KM, and strategic learning, is totally dependent of how people in the organization interact about knowledge-related issues, and that’s all connected to what I refer to as the company’s knowledge culture. Thank you for pointing this out.