Old-school KM delivers more value - proven

Knowledge Management started in the 1990s with three main elements; Communities of Practice, Learning from Experience, and building collective Best Practices.  These three elements are still delivering the most value twenty years later.

Show me the money, by Gabriel Delgado on Flickr

This is one of the findings from our global Knowledge Management Survey.

Communities of Practice, Learning from Experience and Best Practices are three of the five most popular components of Knowledge Management. As part of our survey we asked respondents about their use of these practices, and in a separate question asked them to estimate (in an order of magnitude reply) how much value their KM program had delivered.

A combination of these two replies allows us to see what value the different KM components add.

The table below shows, for example, the average value claimed by the responders who do not use Communities of Practice, versus the average value claimed by those who do.

Knowledge Management component	Percentage of respondents who say they use this component	Average value from those who use the component	Average value from those who do not use the component
Communities of Practice	73%	$145 million	$9 million
Learning from Experience	64%	$142 million	$19 million
Best Practices	62%	$175 million	$9 million

For all three of these old-school KM components, the "users" claim an order-of-magnitude more value from KM than the non-users.

Old-school KM still drives the value.