Here is another interesting result from our Knowledge Management survey, on the two factors that seem to control the size of KM teams.
I say "seem to" as correlation does not imply causation.
The graph here combines results from three questions:
- How big is your KM team
- How big is you organization
- How mature is your KM initiative
It seeks to test whether KM team size grows or shrinks as implementation progresses.
The graph shows, with a remarkable level of consistency, that KM team size is linked both with organization size and with KM maturity.
I expected to see the first correlation, as it is intuitively obvious that the larger the organization, the larger the size of the KM team. I did not expect to see the second correlation.
Intuitively I expected that a KM team would be biggest during the implementation phase, but would slim down once KM was embedded. This is not what the data show. Instead the KM team s are largest where KM is fully embedded.
There are two ways to interpret these results
1) KM team size should be expected to grow as KM implementation progresses, or
2) it is only those organizations with well-resourced KM teams that reach the point of fully embedded KM.
Contact Knoco for advice on selecting and building your KM team
Posts
5 comments:
I believe that it needs further investigations before jumping to conclusions. Sometimes when a process gets mature in an organization, to reward their accomplishments, the board creates a lot of needless tasks to keep the successful team together and justify their budget. The teams may be bigger but how much of their time is spent with relevant KM work? That is the information lacking in this research.
I'd also add that (supposedly) this analysis doesn't take into account different mstrcutures of KM team - is is dispersed into business units or a central one, or a hybrid?
Im not overly surprised by the results but i'd be interested to understand the role of the KM team as im sure it differs from company to company.. Presumably as it matures certain tasks are no longer needed but they are superceded by other items?
Evgeny, the question was "At the moment, roughly how large is the KM team that runs the KM program in your (part of the) organisation?". This should eliminate embedded KM posts in the business.
Tom and Lisandro, the survey did not ask about the tasks of the team - needless or otherwise.
Great Point! I have been thinking about it for a long time now, my gut feeling is that as organization move towards performance excellence in any domain, let alone KM, the amount of energy need to spend to get to the top of the maturity would continue to be required to sustain the level of maturity and to find new ways of sustenance. Else, it just falls down before people realizing it. Though many people claim otherwise, I'm yet to come across an organization travelled to the path of reaching the level 5 maturity in CMM/CMMI/PCMM and other quality standards of maturity and have been able to reduce the workforce and continue to be at the top. I'm of the view that excellence can't be sustained without focus and fulltime resources leading and supporting it, as much as it did to get there, if not more. And therefore the role of CKO isn't about self-destruction or eliminating the KM dept., as many claim it to be!
Post a Comment