Lopez at al Measurement of KM

Stage 1: Enter and Advocate

Measurement

• The value of KM needs to be understood
• Interviewing key stakeholders to cover KM needs.

Stage 2: Explore and Experiment

• Practical definition of KM is formulated within organization and the consideration of its applicability.
• Establish knowledge sharing practices and pilots to draw attention.
• Requests corporate funding and additional resources.

Measurement

• The need for measurement emerges.
• Don’t measure against financial results. Not yet.
• Measurement should emphasis on the efforts of KM initiatives such as progress, acceptance etc.
• Examples are: Measure for Progress, Measure the Gap, Measure against a benchmark and Measure for Cultural readiness.

Stage 3: Discover and conduct pilots

• Formal of KM implementation
• CoP are formalized
• People are enthusiastic about knowledge sharing and their efforts and time are allocated for this knowledge sharing activities.

Measurement

• The key here is to begin to ensure that direct business value is perceived by the organization as a result of the knowledge-enabling projects.

• It is important to establish a mechanism to capture the hard and soft lessons learned in the knowledge management pilots
• Measure the business values: Document both the hard and soft business value derived from each pilot. Begin to map measurements to your specific business goals, such as improved clock speed.
• Measure the retention of knowledge:
•  Time spent per hit. This can reveal if individuals entering the site are actually reviewing its content (indicates quick
• review and rejection vs. what would constitute an individual actually digesting some content). This would have to be
• correlated with the number of individuals using it for an extended period of time and repeat users.
• Are the IP addresses those of repeat users? The intent for this measurement is to track repeat customers. Repeat
• customers indicate two things–either specific information is of repeated use to them or they find value in the additional
• information continually added to the application.
• How often is a site visited?
• What percentage of total hits represents repeat users? Value can be measured by repeat business.
• What is the threshold for indicating a repeat user is a steady customer? Someone may sample a site several times
• but will stop visiting if they fail to get the results they seek.
• Measure the cultural impact
• Measure the effectiveness of sharing communities.
• Measure the ownership of capture and compilation
• Measure project management effectiveness and Intended results

Stage 4: Expand and Support

• KM has proved valuable enough to be officially expanded to become part of the organization’s funded activities.
• When an organization reaches Stage 4, KM has proved valuable enough to be officially expanded to become part of the organization’s funded activitie.
• More formal business evaluation and ROI justification.

Measurement

Evaluating a knowledge area project might require examining many areas of fitness that, in aggregate, help the organization determine whether the projects in its KM portfolio are of high impact and beneficial to the success of the company.
Project criteria may include:

• Proficiency. Has a process become world-class because of KM, or has it made only mediocre improvement?
• Diffusion. Has KM been properly executed? Is the project and knowledge managed well? Is it well understood?
• Codification. Because codifying knowledge is expensive, should the organization limit that? Is that limitation visible and understood?
• Openness for combination/innovation. Is the knowledge described in jargon that no one understands? Is the knowledge base open to other disciplines? Does the project generate questions to the organization to help it grow?

Stage 5: Institutionalization KM

In some ways, Stage 5 is the continuation of Stage 4 to its logical conclusion of full enterprise-wide deployment.
However, Stage 5 differs from Stage 4 in three fundamental ways:

• It does not happen unless KM is embedded in the business model.
• The organization structure must be realigned.
• Evidence of knowledge management competency becomes part of the formal performance evaluation.

Sharing and using knowledge become part of the organization’s “way of doing business” as well as an expected management competency. In the relatively young arena of KM, only a few organizations have reached this stage.

As in Stage 4, Stage 5 measures are not used to prove value. They are used to check progress and monitor the continued evolution of the culture. KM can no longer be called an initiative or project at this stage: Your business relies on it.

Andone, I (2009), Measuring the Performance of Corporate Knowledge Management Systems, Informatica Economică vol. 13, no. 4/2009

Andone, I (2009), Measuring the Performance of Corporate Knowledge Management Systems, Informatica Economică vol. 13, no. 4/2009

• Measurement is the least developed aspects of KM because of the difficulties in defining it afnd measuring it.
• Without measurable success, enthusiasm and support of KM is unlikely to continue. 
• Without measurable success, unable to know what works and what doesn’t.

KM Measurement Approach (Andone, 2009)

1) Measuring the impact of KM on the corporate performance

• KM is used to enhance corporate performance and achieve its objective therefore, companies makes a tie-in measurement of KM with overall corporate performance measurement system.
• Can be done at any level: organization, project, departmental
• Disadvantage is because of KM is an integral part of the process its relative contribution of KM to the overall success of the organization/project is difficult to know.
• O’Dell and Grayson recommend a two-prong approach that measures outcomes and activities.
• Measuring outcomes focuses on the extent to which a project or a process achieves its stated objective. Success of the project or a process serves as a proxy measure for the success of KM practices embedded into it.
• For example, measuring outcomes means looking at reduced cost, time, improved efficiency and quality. Then we measure the activities of KM that were applied into that project/process.
• Measuring activities looking at how often users are accessing, contributing to or using any knowledge resources or practices that have been set up. These measures can be quantitative or hard measures such as the number of frequency of hits, submissions to the intranet by employee.  Soft measures tell us why do they do it. This measurement look at behaviour, perception etc.

2) Balance Scorecard

• An increasingly popular approach to measuring a corporate performance, and one that is being widely adopted in knowledge management.
• The balanced scorecard focuses on linking an organization’s strategy and objectives to measures from four key perspectives: financial, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth.
• This knowledge management, which is about learning and growth, is measured as an integral and yet distinct part of overall organizational performance. The balanced scorecard approach can be applied to individual initiatives as well as to a whole corporate.
• The four perspectives can be framed as follows:
• Financial: How do we look to our ‘shareholders’ (or governing bodies)?
• Customer: How do our clients see us? Are we meeting their needs and expectations?
• Internal processes: What do we need to do well in order to succeed? What are the critical processes that have the greatest impact on our patients and our financial objectives?
• Learning and growth: How can we develop our ability to learn and grow in order to meet our objectives in the above three areas?

3) Return on Investment

• Most initiatives that require resources will be expected to show a return in investment –what benefits did we get to justify the costs involved.
• The problem is that both the costs and the benefits of knowledge management can be notoriously difficult to pin down. While the costs associated with an investment in information technology can be relatively straightforward to identify, other costs can be less so.

4) Employee Survey

• Surveys can be used to assess aspects of organizational culture and the extent to which people’s opinions, attitudes and behaviors are, or are not, changing.
• Obviously such surveys measure people’s subjective perceptions and these may or may not reflect reality, but in many ways that can be their very benefit, as people’s perceptions will determine their behaviors with respect to knowledge management

Steps in Developing KM Measures

1. Revisit Corporate Goals – What are the goals of the KM initiative?
2. Know the audience of the measure – Users who participate, customers etc.
3. Define the measures – It must be valid and reliable and the information from the measures can be acted upon.
4. Decide what information can be collected and how it will be collected
5. Analyzing and communicating the measures
6. Review the combination of measures

Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know

Chapter 5 – Knowledge Transfer

Water cooler metaphor

• How can an org transfer knowledge effectively? Hire smart people and let them talk to each other.
• Davenport and Prusak believes that knowledge is transferred during face-to-face meetings.
• Conversations at the water cooler and talk rooms. Many Japs companies have set up talk rooms to encourage this kind of unpredictable creating blending and exchange.
• Dai-Ichi Pharmaceuticals in Japan -> management provide rooks with green tea and attractive ligtnthing  that researchers are expected to visit for 20 mins or so as part of their workday. After work hangout, going to bars is part of this culture.
• Google has laid back office layout to promote knowledge sharing. Click here
• Japanese don’t use email and prefer face-to-face.
• Knowledge transfer methods should suit the organizational and national culture.

Knowledge Fairs and Open Forums

• A knowledge fair is an event designed to showcase information about an organization or a topic. It can be organized in many ways using speakers, demonstrations, or more commonly, booths displaying information of interest to the attendees. One example is the Xerox Corporation’s annual “Team Day” that showcases the work of various quality-improvement teams. (Reference)
• Example of companies that organize knowledge fair are Ernst and Young and CSIRO, a large Australian R & D organization.
• Knowledge fairs are unstructured allow people to mingle. Conferences are more structured.

What kinds of knowledge?

• The difficulty of capturing and transferring knowledge depends on the kind of knowledge involved.

Social Network Analysis Resources

The resources for SNA can be found here:

• Centralities1

Materials for Lectures / Tutorials / Tests

Sample lecture slides from Elias Awad KM textbook

1. Knowledge Management System  class – UNE, Australia

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Found this website when looking for articles companies that implement KM systems. The URL is

http://www.santarosa.edu/~ssarkar/cs66fl07/gw/gw8s.htm

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CIS 66 -Management Information Systems – Group Work #8

http://www.santarosa.edu/~ssarkar/cs66fl07/gw/gw8s.htm

Cuatrecasas, a leading Spanish law firm implemented Hummingbird Enterprise to provide a standard platform for organizing and managing both structured and …

Personalization vs Codification

List of Reading Assignments

Articles for the KM classes are downloaded from Inside Knowledge magazine and KM World magazine (as for now).

 

Knowledge Strategy

Social Network Analysis

• The development of social network analysis

KM  Measurement

• Measuring the State of KM: Part I
• Measuring the State of KM: Part II
• Measuring the State of KM: Part III

Reading Assignment #1

In search of Understanding by David Gurteen

1. We can have access to perfect information and perfect knowledge but there is no guarantee we can make wiser decisions or put the knowledge into productive use.
2. We focus too much on the mechanics but less on the observation and interpretation. The only solution is to conversation. Conversation allows us to see the real world. It makes us aware and understand the real world.
3. The barriers of conversation are we do not listen to each other and we do not say what we think.
4. We need to converse openly to improve our knowledge and to make it into productive use.

Issues on FYP2 student

1. The thing that worries is whether the student can deliver on time.  Students are still in the analysis stage. Interviews are still on going, questionnaires is still yet to be distributed and at the same time have to come up with design, development and testing.
2. I think the student should be proactive. They should firm up a bit. Don’t be lazy and relax. I think that if the student is able to complete analysis in FYP1, they will be a bit relax in FYP2. It is like still unfinished business.
3. Nurzairin gantt chart indicate unnecessary time allocated for a task. Simple tasks should be given lower number of days to complete. You don’t need two weeks to develop system flow. Put more time in analysis and simultaneously do the design and do the development. This is the only way FYP2 students can pull it through. If they still feel blurry up till now, I don’t think that I can help them. I have given it all.

L1 – Data Information and Knowledge

1. Student is introduced to the differences between data, information and knowledge. What we are managing is knowledge. Therefore, it is important for the students to learn the differences between the three.
2. The concept of knowledge is discussed. The matter of fact that I don’t have the original text in which the slides are based on affect my ability to explain clearly.
3. I think that the white text book provides a better structure on the topic Understanding knowledge. It seems that the previous lecturer also uses the same material. The book has questions which is really cool.
4. Data is simply raw in its existence and it does not mean anything. Information is contextualized data. It is as a result of aggregation or processed data. Knowledge is contextualized information. It is as a result of seeing patterns from the information gathered.
5. By definition, knowledge is defined as understanding obtained from experience and formal learning. It can be in the form of heuristics (insights, rules of thumbs), facts (sky is blue) or procedural.
6. I also talked about the types of knowledge. The types covered are deep knowledge and shallow knowledge. Another classification is procedural, declarative, episodic and semantic.
7. The lecture slides present another famous classification of knowledge: Tacit vs Explicit. I feel tacit or explicit is more forms of knowledge rather than knowledge type. It makes more sense. Who introduced this Tacit vs Explicit? Anyone knows.
8. Next week, I will introduce the views of knowledge. In what way do we view knowledge.

Exercises/Assignment

1. Define KM – Find 5 definition of KM and write a summary of your understanding on what KM is.
2. Give examples for each knowledge type mentioned in the lecture.  Students must not use the lecturer’s example.
3. Write the references.
4. Upload the answer to elearning / gmail / Google Docs. Use the standard naming convention.