Tuesday, 15 January 2013


Can you "self-assess" your knowledge management maturity?


58/365 -- Thirteen Stone A simple self-assessment for knowledge management maturity is an attractive proposition for many clients. They come to us asking for our free self-assessment tool, or looking to use our online KM maturity benchmarking survey.

These simple tools give a first pass awareness of how far people have got with Knowledge Management, but there is a real limit with this sort of self-assessment, which is that the relative beginner in KM terms does not know what they do not know, and often will not see what is missing.

We saw that in one company, where we ran a number of surveys, and initially people scored themselves quite high, as they thought "surely we do a lot of KM stuff already". After a while, when they realised what Good KM really could look like, they realised they had a very long way to go, and their self- assessment scores dropped. At first sight the fall in scores might be interpreted as meaning they were moving backwards, whereas in fact they were just beginning to understand how far they had to go.

The self-assessment is a start, but if you are to take KM seriously, you also need an expert assessment.

  • If the self-assessment is a Readers Digest article on "How fit are you", then the expert assessment is the visit to the personal trainer.
  • If the self-assessment is taking your pulse and temperature, then the expert assessment is the visit to the doctor.
  • If the self-assessment is  filling in a cosmo Relationship survey, then the expert assessment is the visit to the Relationship Counsellor.
By all means try our self-assessments as a first step, then when you are ready to really make a start, contact us for a full expert assessment

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