Drivers for KM activity

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I posted a while ago about how I was beginning to see KM appearing in pre-qualification documents as a requirement for contractors tendering against contracts for government and for major clients.

In the last 2 months I have seen two other similar drivers for KM adoption. The first was from a big-company audit of potential suppliers, where they fed back to one supplier that

• your company is formed into silos,
• your silos are clearly not talking with each other, especially for identification and re-use of lessons learned,
• your company needs effective Knowledge Management.

The second example was a service company that wanted to demonstrate to clients that they were competent operators, and part of that would be to demonstrate a good KM system, because "our customers will expect us to do KM". Unfortunately the vision from their sales team was "a glitzy website or wiki we can show our clients", rather than a KM system that delivers value to the company itself, but nevertheless, the driver was there.

Good Knowledge Management, I would assert, is increasingly becoming an expectation; from clients, from customers, and from contracts.

This expectation-based driver will certainly revive the KM industry, as expectations from clients, customers and contracts will drive internal expectations within organisations.

Unfortunately there is no clear consensus on what "Good Knowledge Management looks like", though there are some common components, such as

• A connected organisation
• A good quality knowledge base, and
• An effective system for learning from experience.