A successful knowledge management system contributes to the achievement of a company’s strategic objectives. At the same time, it improves job performance and increases the job satisfaction of each member of the organization.
By demonstrating that knowledge management improves performance, reduces costs, and increases customer responsiveness, your organization’s leaders will see how knowledge management is closely tied to the success of their business strategy.
Why Should We Measure Knowledge Management?
In times where the economy is uncertain and budgets are tight, knowledge management professionals must be able to show the business value that sharing and reusing knowledge brings to organizations.
A large part of the companies use indicators to have concrete data that shows the performance of each process. These measures summarize the information or data that an organization wants to collect, such as customer satisfaction, worker productivity, or cost savings.
Metrics are quantitative measurements that are typically used to measure operational performance or resource allocation.
When an organization creates effective indicators and tracks metrics around knowledge sharing and consumption, it is possible to successfully track the use and benefits of a knowledge management system.
What should be taken into account when developing measures and metrics related to knowledge management?
First, it is extremely difficult to create any knowledge sharing measure that shows an absolute correlation between a knowledge sharing action and a business outcome.
Second, to truly understand the impact of knowledge sharing and reuse, an organization must understand its underlying business or process performance before beginning knowledge management. If you don’t know where the starting line is, how do you plan to get to the finish line?
It should also be borne in mind that the indicators must have specific and discrete measurement units (for example, it is preferable to measure “rate of decrease in face-to-face consultations among workers in the same area” instead of “use of knowledge pills in video format”). In addition, the cost of measuring an indicator should be considered, preferring those that can be measured digitally and automatically.
Knowledge management and search solutions
Thanks to search solution working with AI and NLP, the employees are able to find any piece of information by a set of criteria, thus making it easier to manage knowledge and to find information.
Some enterprise search platform are designed to support a wide range of search applications.
Some Suggested Indicators For Knowledge Management
Second Level Indicators
The second level indicators are more general in nature and have to do with knowledge management at the organizational level. These indicators are closely linked to organizational performance. These indicators are adapted from the proposal by Gold et al (2001):
1. Acquisition of Knowledge
It is the activity by which knowledge managers or workers themselves seek knowledge from sources external to the organization and create new knowledge by adapting external knowledge to the procedural or cultural reality of the organization.
2. Conversion of Knowledge
It is the process by which the knowledge or good practices that are already applied inside or outside the organizational context are captured and formalized in knowledge tablets accessible from the organization’s knowledge management platform.
3. Application of Knowledge
It is the way in which knowledge is used in the context of daily work; Measuring this indicator is critical to verify if the knowledge has been correctly converted, as long as it is understandable and applicable by the worker within the context of their daily work.
4. Knowledge Protection
This indicator assesses the extent to which the organization’s intellectual capital is being protected so that sensitive capital is not accessed by outsiders. These indicators that are strongly linked to the growth of organizations.
Is it Necessary to Measure Success?
Of course yes. Metrics are used to help managers identify if their organizations are doing better than yesterday. Plus, they track progress to let employees know what really matters.
To manage knowledge, measures and tools must be adopted that work at the level of policies, plans, programs, strategies and development. All these must be quantified and verified with adequate indicators. In addition, it is of utmost importance:
- The formation of human capital in all areas of the company in order to seek efficiency in the operation of organizations.
- Implement circles of knowledge and lessons learned.
- Implement coaching or mentoring, and a taste for learning and creating new knowledge within the organization.
What Should A Company Expect From Knowledge Management?
Difficult as it may be to digest; organizations shouldn’t expect a significant short-term return on investment (ROI). ROI takes time due to the complexity of understanding the impact that people, process, content and technology have on knowledge exchange and, consequently, the company.
Many executives embark on the knowledge management adventure because they understand that sharing and reusing knowledge helps the business. However, the price of aligning people with tools, content and processes that facilitate the flow of knowledge is not cheap or easy.
