How do you know KM is failing in your organisation? This was a question raised yesterday at a workshop I ran a few years back at KM World.
Assuming you have introduced KM, embedded it into business processes, and the central KM team has effectively handed it over to the business, how can you tell whether this was successful, and that KM is alive and well?
This is an issue we faced in one organisation about 10 years ago, and the clue that KM was failing came through a series of metrics.
- Attendance at KM training courses was dropping
- The rate at which lessons were entering the lessons database was falling
- Activity in the community of practice was decreasing
- At the same time, there was a change in the business metrics, and costs began to rise.
Of course it may have been coincidence that costs were rising at the same time as KM activity was falling, but all of these metrics gave us concern that KM was beginning to fail, and may have been having an adverse effect on business efficiency. We therefore introduced a KM refresh program, aimed at the middle managers in order to engage them in clarifying and reinforcing the KM expectations. Things picked up again, and the business metrics began to improve.
The way you can know KM is failing is through metrics.
- Activity metrics can show the drop-off of KM activity,
- Compliance measures can show that people are no longer doing whats expected of them in KM, and
- Business metrics can show any associated business impact.
Make sure you have a "KM dashboard" so you can track activity and spot the warning signs in time to take evasive action.
See our winter 2009 newsletter for more on metrics.
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To prevent KM is failing we should migrate from DIKW continuum
From my point of view, KM is failing after about 2 decades had been utilized rooted from two causes factor. The first driven by our unnatural postulate. In KM solid and natural postulates needed as scientific requirement that should applied to our KM framework model mentioning “The Universe or the Nature Knowledge is the source and center of Consciousness” instead of “Mind Brain or Human Being is the source and center of Consciousness”. And secondly, “We are KM – regulated by Nature (natural world), and by nature (character or kind) we are KM model”.
And the second cause should get underlined that most of us commonly trapped within DIKW continuum. Beyond DIKW continuum coined as Nature Knowledge (NK) continuum where Human Knowledge (HK) which is representing DIKW continuum is just part of NK continuum. This is the consideration that consciousness given broad meaning could exist outside human being. Say it as cosmic consciousness
Similar with modern Physics (representing Matter and Energy) which is currently experienced with so many unresolved problems, so does with KM due to DIKW trap. We tried to get free from DIKW or Human Knowledge (HK) trap by migrating to Nature Knowledge (NK) continuum (representing consciousness as ths attribute of Knowledge) through our so called Human System Biology-based Knowledge Management (HSB_KM) framework model. In this circumstance, we also developed special KM metrics. Within this dynamic KM model we named it as the 4th Era of KM. The implication and the practice of the 4th Era of KM seems very promising with regard to success of KM mission. Later, our experience showing that broadened dynamic of the 4th Era of KM came up with so called Nature Knowledge Theory (NKT) complementing Physics as prior basic science within hierarchy of science. Further for the sake of Science of 21st century, the formal science comprising of Math and Logic should get redefined through Social Value complementation
Ref : “THE DESIGN OF FUTURE SCIENCE : Synopsis of Newly Discovered Upstream Science” - http://ow.ly/Uaeln and “Framework model of the 4th Era of Knowledge Management” - http://ow.ly/U1Dma
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